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EXPERIMENT

IN THE FILM

edited by Roger Man veil

In all walks of life experiment precedes
and paves the way for practical and
widespread development. The Film is
no exception, yet although it must be
considered one of the most popular
forms of entertainment, very little is
known by the general public about its
experimental side. This book is a collec-
tion of essays by the leading experts of
all countries on the subject, and it is
designed to give a picture of the growth
and development of experiment in the
Film. Dr. Roger Manvell, author of the
Penguin book Film, has edited the
collection and contributed a general
appreciation.

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EDITED BY ROGER MANVELL

THE GREY WALLS PRESS LTD

First published in 1949

by the Grey Walls Press Limited

7 Crown Passage, Pall Mall, London S.W.I

Printed in Great Britain

by Balding & Mansell Limited

London

AUSTRALIA

The Invincible Press
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide

NEW ZEALAND

The Invincible Press, Wellington

SOUTH AFRICA

M. Darling (Pty.) Ltd., Capetown

EDITOR'S FOREWORD

The aim of this book is quite simply to gather together the
views of a number of people, prominent either in the field of
film-making or film-criticism or in both, on the contribution of
their country to the experimental development of the film. The
medium of the cinema has become highly flexible during its first
half-century of existence: the time is now ripe to take stock of
what has so far been achieved.

Each writer was left free to choose between making a more
general study of film-making in his country from an experimental
point of view, or, where the consistent production of unusual
films had taken place, making a specific study of that form of
cinema which has come to be termed the avant-garde in com-
pliment to France where the most notable school of advanced
experiment in the film took place between 1925 and 1932. Con-
sequently Jacques Brunius and Lewis Jacobs have chosen to
confine themselves entirely to this branch of film art.

Experiment in Germany, Russia and Britain occurred more
consistently in films belonging to the main stream of production.
In the case of Germany we have, however, been able to sup-
plement Ernst Iros's essay with a short note on the German
avant-garde by one of its most notable practitioners, Hans
Richter, who is now working in America. We have also thought
it necessary to add some points on the contribution of the film
to science, and a short essay on this subject is contributed by
John Maddison, who has made a special study of this branch of
film-making from an international point of view. My own essay
is an attempt, by way of introduction, to show something of how
the film has matured and expanded as a medium of expression
in the hands of a few outstanding artists, whose instinctive
feeling for the nature of the new art led them to discover and
use some of its great technical powers.

EDITOR'S FOREWORD

I hope that these essays collectively will add to the knowledge
and appreciation of the film as the great artistic discovery of
our time. The cinema has already produced a considerable
number of artists whose individuality and hatred of convention
or platitude have led them into strange and courageous uses of
the film. From such little-known work flows the life-blood of
the art, keeping its expression young and vital. It is to these
film-makers specifically that we dedicate this evaluation of their
work alongside the experimental achievements of their colleagues
serving the greater public of the world's cinemas.

London, 1948 Roger Manvell

CONTENTS

editor's foreword page 5

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM 13

Roger Manvell

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE 60

Jacques B. Brunius

Translated by Mary Kesteven

AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA 113

Lewis Jacobs

SOVIET FILM 153

Grigori Roshal

Translated by Catherine de la Roche

SOVIET DOCUMENTARY 171

Roman Karmen

Translated by Catherine de la Roche

EXPANSION OF THE GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN FILM 189

Ernst Iros

Translated by Bernard and Moura Wolpert

AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY 219

Hans Richter

DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN 234

Edgar Anstey

EXPERIMENT IN THE SCIENTIFIC FILM 266

John Maddison

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

275

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2012 with funding from

Media History Digital Library

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. la femme du nulle part facing page 64

Louis Delluc, France, 1922

2. LA FETE ESPAGNOL 64

Germaine Dulac, France, 1920

3. EN RADE 64

Cavalcanti, France, 1926-7

4. LA COQUILLE ET LE CLERGYMAN 64

Germaine Dulac, France, 1927

5. l'inhumaine 65

Marcel UHerbier, France, 1925

6. LA ROUE 65

Abel Gance, France, 1920-22

7. LA PASSION DE JEANNE D'ARC 65

Carl Dreyer, France, 1928

8. BALLET MECANIQUE 80

Fernand Leger, France, 1924-5

9. LA FILLE DE l'eAU 80

Jean Renoir, France, 1925

10. FINIS terrae 80

Jean Epstein, France, 1929

11. l'affaire est dans le sac 80

Jacques and Pierre Prevert, France, 1932
Jacques Brunius as D Homme au Beret Frangais

12. LES VAMPIRES 81

Louis Feuillade, France, 1915
13-16. entr'acte 81

Rene Clair, France, 1924

17-20. UN CHIEN ANDALOU 81

Luis Buhuel, France, 1928

21. A PROPOS DE NICE 112

Jean Vigo, France, 1930

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

22. l'affaire est dans le sac facing page 112

Jacques and Pierre Prevert, France, 1932

23. NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE 112

Alexeief and Parker, France, 1934

24. PLAGUE SUMMER 113

Chester Kessler, U.S.A., 1947

25. h2o 113

Ralph Steiner, U.S.A., 1929

26. SYNCHRONISATION 113

Joseph Schillinger and Lewis Jacobs, U.S.A., 1934

27. A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA 113

Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey, U.S.A., 1928

28. FIREWORKS 128

Kenneth Anger, U.S.A., 1947

29. FOOTNOTE TO FACT 128

Lewis Jacobs, U.S.A.

30. INTROSPECTION 128

Sara Arledge, U.S.A.

31. POTTED PSALM 128

Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, U.S.A., 1947

32. DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY: NARCISSUS SEQUENCE 129

Hans Richter, U.S.A., 1947

33. LOT AND SODOM 129

/. S. Watson and Melville Webber, U.S.A., 1933-4

34. HOUSE OF CARDS 129

Joseph Vogel, U.S.A., 1947

35. RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME 144

Maya Deren, U.S.A., 1946

36. MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON 144

Maya Deren, U.S.A., 1943

37. AT LAND 144

Maya Daren, U.S.A., 1944

38. THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN 145

Sergei Eisenstein, U.S.S.R., 1925

39. MOTHER 145

V. I. Pudovkin, U.S.S.R., 1926

40. EARTH 145

Alexander Dovzhenko, U.S.S.R., 1930

41. THE NEW GULLIVER 160

A. Ptushko, U.S.S.R., 1935
10

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

42. chors facing page 160

Alexander Dovzhenko, U.S.S.R., 1939

43. CHILDHOOD OF MAXIM GORKI 160

Mark Donskoi, U.S.S.R., 1938

44. THE vow 161

M. Chiaureli, U.S.S.R., 1946

45. ALEXANDER NEVSKY 161

Sergei Eisenstein, U.S.S.R., 1938

46. robinson crusoe: Stereoscopic film 161

A. Andrievsky, U.S.S.R., 1946

47. BERLIN 224

Walther Ruttmann, Germany, 1927

48. BRAHMS' RHAPSODY 224

Oscar Fischinger, Germany, 1931

49. UBERFALL 224

Ernoe Metzner, Germany, 1929

50. pandora's box 224

G. W. Pabst, Germany, 1928

51. BLACKMAIL 225

Alfred Hitchcock, Britain, 1929

52. SONG OF CEYLON 225

Basil Wright, Britain, 1934

53. RAINBOW DANCE 225

Len Lye, Britain, 1936

54. AIRSCREW 240

Grahame Tharp, Britain, 1940

55. SHIPYARD 240

Paul Rotha, Britain, 1934

56. OLIVER TWIST 240

David Lean, Britain, 1947

57. CRABES ET CREVETTES 241

Jean Painleve, France

58. HYDRA 241

Percy Smith, G.B. Instructional

59. THE FERN 241

Percy Smith, G.B. Instructional

We are grateful to the following for their co-operation in supplying
stills: the National Film Library, the British Film Academy, the
Cinematheque Francaise, the Society for Cultural Relations with the
U.S.S.R., the Soviet Film Agency, the Edinburgh Film Guild, the Rank
Organisation, Shell Film Unit, Lewis Jacobs, Jacques Brunius, and
Messrs Faber and Faber.

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

BY ROGER MANVELL

The New Art of the Film

the science of the film was born when the first inventors
projected their moving photographic images onto a screen. The
art of the film was born when the first artist was excited by the
chances offered him by these inventors' achievements. Another
medium had been created with which to bridge the unhappy gulf
between man and men. When Melies ran to Lumiere and begged
him for permission to use his moving picture apparatus, the in-
ventor laughed: why should an ingenious toy inspire such an
interest in an adult? But Melies knew with the intuitive foresight
of the artist that here was a medium to which he could devote the
main productive part of his life.

No art had appeared before which was so suddenly to transform
the relationships of men and delight their imaginations. No art
before had been so completely dependent for its absolute existence
on technical equipment which science was not ready to provide
before the nineteenth century. The slow-moving passage of the
generations since humanity had learnt to plough and build became
more intricate as thought evolved and civilizing activities widened.
The process we call civilization had emerged after the agonies
of ten thousand years in which men tortured each other because
they could not learn the control and tolerance necessary to live
productively and at peace together in the light of the knowledge
and the sense of beauty which their philosophers and their artists

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

had developed for them. For these teachers and artists, using the
words so painfully evolved in the mouths of men and the earliest
of musical sounds and visual images, became the first legislators
of man, guiding him towards a form of living where values might
overcome violence. When these standards tended to prevail, as in
the golden age of Greece, we can speak of civilization. When these
standards were destroyed by greed and cruelty, civilization halted
and waited as a recollection in the minds of a minority of educated
men until circumstances permitted its wider resumption. There
are therefore no dates, barely even periods for the birth of drama,
of poetry, of fiction, of sculpture, of painting and of music. No one
can say when the civilizing arts began as an active and continuous
preoccupation for men who singled themselves out from the rest
of mankind to practise these professions, which produced no im-
mediate results in food, or clothing or shelter. Over the thousands
of years, in the variety of the world's climates and civilizations,
the arts were nurtured, until their achievement became so high
and so permanent that examples and records of them have sur-
vived to the present day.

Similarly, the technical innovations with which the artist has
widened the range and effectiveness of his medium have come
slowly after generations of practice. The introduction of the tech-
nique of perspective to painting was the event of a century. Yet
because the film has come so late in this preliminary phase of
human civilization in which we live, we expect it to show a matur-
ity similar to that of music and painting after merely fifty years of
existence. Rarely has an art evolved under such high pressure, like
the Greek drama of fifth- century Athens, and that was unhindered
by the economic and educational barriers which complicate the
relationship of the artists of our time to their public. The later
technical innovations of the cinema (sound and colour) arrived
suddenly, shaping its youth most awkwardly. The sound film
required a major readjustment of film aesthetics whilst it widened
the scope of film technique to a degree we have yet barely realized.
Colour has brought its own technical complications, and stereo-
scopy will soon revolutionize the art of the film once more. But
not only these major readjustments but a host of minor ones
complicate the task of the film artist. The film's deviation from
the mere straight recording of sound and image into the undis-

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

covered country where sound may be distorted in an infinite
number of effects, or may be recorded with instrumental effects
impossible for an orchestra to reproduce directly to the human
ear, these and other discoveries have revealed possibilities hither-
to untouched for the artist who will dare to experiment with
them. Similarly, the image in this fundamentally visual art may
be distorted or optically treated until it achieves effects unknown
to the human eye watching the world of normally visible pheno-
mena. No artist before has been given a medium of such astonish-
ing flexibility, where all arts seem to combine to serve his purposes
in forms completely under his control, should he have the
imagination to evolve them. Great though the artists are who
have already served the cinema, none has brought the art of a
Shakespeare or a Beethoven to free the film from the constricting
circumstances of its established convention. We work still in the
formative age of a Marlowe. Our Shakespeare may come in the
next half-century. Meanwhile it is well for all film-artists of
imagination to prepare the way for him.

When he does arrive he will find his artistry tested by the
involved pattern of film economy. The artist must not only
support himself during the process of his creation, he must obtain
the tools and raw materials of his medium. No film can exist
merely on paper, any more than a building can exist in a blue-
print. The final art which transforms the spectator into a partici-
pant in the action cannot exist until production has been under-
taken and the film has reached its final polished stage of editing.
A great barrier of finance, the costs of creating this complex
technical entity, have placed the artist in the hands alike of
promoter and public, a public so wide that it must extend to
millions before the promoter sees his profit. Few artists have
acquired the money of a Griffith or a Chaplin to satisfy their
personal ambition in celluloid, or have been given the latitude to
create films according to their imagination which a few Soviet
directors have enjoyed. Most film artists are forced to compromise
to meet the wishes of the promoter and the assumed desires of the
public. Most film artists, too, unless they have also unusual qualities
of artistic leadership, find they must allow for the fact that their
art requires the collective contributions of scriptwriters, designers,
motion-picture photographers, sound recordists and composers.

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

The film is not the only co-operative art. Architecture notably
requires the group understanding of the purpose of a design, and
may well involve a number of designers before a great building is
unified with decoration and furnishings, and its effect possibly
augmented by the presence of statuary and paintings. Music is a
co-operative art, for music cannot be heard without the execu-
tant. Drama similarly requires producer, actor and designer. Even
a painter has been known to use assistants on a single work which
he supervises and to which he contributes the uniqueness of his
touch. But no great art is so completely dependent upon the har-
monious blending of skills as the film, which, because it is a pic-
torial art, requires a special virtue in designer and actor as well as
in the photographer who lights and frames their work and the editor
who controls its presentation in time, and a further virtue in the
imaginative use of sound in its elaboration of speech, music and
the noises of nature. Among the small army of technicians (camera-
men, electricians, sound engineers, carpenters, decorators, and
many more) who crowd the film set, there must preside over them
a small group of artists who have agreed among themselves as to the
final artistic integrity of the work they have undertaken. Without
this unity of purpose the potentially valuable collective effort of
their imaginations will be squandered in disintegrating attempts
to dominate the film by a number of rival skills. The greater the
difficulty of achieving harmony in the composition of an art, the
greater the artistic triumph when that harmony is brought about.

The history of experiment in the film is the history of imagina-
tion applied by single individuals who have often worked alone,
subjecting their technicians entirely to their purpose, or who have
built around them teams which understand their individual styles
and manner of work. Bitzer was Griffith's cameraman throughout
the important productive years of his life: so was Tisse, Eisen-
stein's cameraman for all his great productions. Though the
credit due to these subsidiary artists is considerable, no one denies
that the original conception, the final creation, the purpose and
dynamic of the work of Griffith and Eisenstein emanated from
them alone.

The coming of sound and colour has made the technical under-
standing required of the great director far wider and more com-
plicated than during the silent period. The Shakespeare of the

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

screen will have to be effective master of all its technical poten-
tialities, composition, colour, rhythm and sound. He must be a
master of drama conveyed by pictorial images, by dialogue, by
music, by the sounds of the natural world. His attention while he
is at work will be dispersed over a variety of activities all of which
must be a calculated part of his purpose. So far, there have
been few artists working in the cinema who have begun to possess
all these qualities in one single talent. We await still this superman.

The Nature of Film Art

The film is a new and independent art of expression. It belongs to
the narrative arts since it develops its subject (whether by story
or argument) in the process of time. As a medium for story-telling
it belongs to the dramatic group, since its characters have to be
impersonated. Yet it is a new and independent medium, because
it can give its subject-matter, as all the great arts do, the advan-
tage of its own peculiar powers of expression.

All arts possess the limitations natural to their form. The
painter must work in two dimensions within the limits of his
canvas. The sculptor must observe the qualities of his stone and
carve with a care for the texture of his woods. The poet must use
the sound values of words and the rhythmic framework of his
verse. Yet the very limitations thus imposed upon him are a gift
which test his skill and give delight to his public. The values of
his meaning are enhanced by the beauty and dexterity of his use
of his medium of expression. Every artist delights in this technical
struggle, for he knows it is to his advantage. Every genius
succeeds in expanding his chosen medium beyond the limits which
previous artists have observed. It is the function of genius to
reveal new horizons.

The delight of Griffith, Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Grierson is
the delight of the true artist:

'The task I'm trying to achieve is above all to make you see.'
(Griffith, quoted by Lewis Jacobs, Rise of the American Film,
p. 119.)

2 17

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

'The novelist expresses his key-stones in written descriptions,
the dramatist by rough dialogue, but the scenarist must think in
plastic (externally expressive) images. He must train his imagina-
tion, he must develop the habit of representing to himself what-
ever comes into his head in the form of a sequence of images upon
the screen. Yet more, he must learn to command these images and
to select from those he visualises the clearest and most vivid; he
must know how to command them as the writer commands his
words and the playwright his spoken phrases.' (Film Technique,
by Pudovkin, p. 14.)

'The first task is the creative breaking-up of the theme into
determining representations, and then combining these repre-
sentations with the purpose of bringing to life the initiating
images of the theme. And the process whereby this image is per-
ceived is identical with the original experiencing of the theme of
the image's content. Just as inseparable from this intense and
genuine experience is the work of the director in writing his
shooting-script. This is the only way that suggests to him those
decisive representations through which the whole image of his
theme will flash into creative being.

'Herein lies the secret of that emotionally exciting quality of
exposition (as distinguished from the affidavit-exposition of mere
information) of which we spoke earlier, and which is just as much
a condition of a living performance by an actor as of living film-
making.' (The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, p. 44.)

'I remember coming away from the last war with the very
simple notion in my head that somehow we had to make peace
exciting, if we were to prevent wars. Simple notion as it is, that
has been my propaganda ever since — to make peace exciting. In
one form or another I have produced or initiated hundreds of
films; yet I think behind every one of them has been that one idea,
that the ordinary affairs of people's lives are more dramatic and
more vital than all the false excitements you can muster. That has
seemed to me something worth spending one's life over.' (Grierson
on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy, p. 154.)

These words are not written or spoken by men preoccupied
with a lesser art. They are the statements of men fully alive to the

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

widening responsibilities which come from being pioneers in a new
medium that has emerged at a time when the other major arts are
already mature and well established. The film went through the
forcing-house of childhood and adolescence in an astonishingly
short period. It has always as its rivals the drama and the novel,
and it was inevitable that its technique would develop rapidly in
order that it should be brought to a state of equality with these
rivals. Its mass audiences, ill-equipped to appreciate artistic
subtleties and almost untouched by the beauties of great theatre
and great writing, have shown themselves to be at once the worst
handicap and the brightest glory of the film. There is no finer
audience for the artist to work for than the audience of the human
race as a whole, but in an age of incomplete and unequal standards
of civilization, the mass audience will tend to favour only the
easier forms of emotional expression. Therefore the artist finds
himself surrounded by promoters who are only too ready to keep
the mass audience pleased with trifles. It is the function of the
artist to lead, to initiate, to legislate. There is no doubt he will
eventually do all these things, whatever the economic difficulties
he has to face. Shakespeare did this in an open theatre filled with
courtiers and groundlings whose manners were no better than
those to be found in a low-grade cinema today. But by his subtle
combination of showmanship and poetry Shakespeare in a few
years raised the standard of his drama to a level which has never
been equalled since. The artist must not become remote from his
audience, a recluse hiding the treasures of his genius behind an
esoteric veil. He must, as Euripides, Shakespeare, Moliere, Balzac.
Dickens and Shaw have done, take the thoughts and emotions of
the people and turn them to his purpose through the natural
quality of his art. When an artist of this stature arrives to lift the
cinema into line with the achievement of Shakespeare and Beet-
hoven he will not make films only for the elite and the cultured.
He will make films so ostensibly human in value and so rich in
ingenuity that no cinema audience will remain unmoved.

He has at his disposal a technical medium of astonishing
potentialities many of which I do not believe we have at present
the imagination to foresee. To repeat, we have not evolved beyond
the rich and promising stage of Marlowe in our pursuit of the film
drama. What subtle structures, what new and sudden similies,

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

what finer grades of human observation await us in an age when
the philosopher has offered mankind relativity and the psycho-
logist the newer sciences of the mind for his background, only
this great creative artist himself can show. But I believe them to
be there, and all the experiments with the technical medium of the
cinema which the past few decades have produced are the
beginnings only of a contribution which this artist will take up
and develop for his purposes.

He has incomparable advantages. Visually he can govern com-
pletely the range of his audiences' vision: he can make them see
detail in high magnification, or he can sweep their eyes over a
landscape or the surface of the moon. He can control their
approach to what he allows them to see: he can distort his image
at will, softening it to annihilation or sharpening it with light and
focusing it into an emphatic, challenging object. He can control
its presentation in time, allowing a long or short impression of it,
a continuous view from a fixed place, or one varied as to angle and
viewpoint. He can present it, too, in black and white, in natural
colour or in artificial colour, modifying completely the viewer's
attitude to what he sees, as real, unreal or fantastic. He can allow
it normal movement; or he can quicken, retard, or reverse its
movement. He can present it as a two-dimensional image, or when
the equipment becomes available for him, he will be able to make
use of the illusion of the third dimension.

'On February 4, 1941, shortly before the great patriotic war,
there was given a show of the first stereoscopic film, Concert, in
the cinema "Moskva" in Moscow. For the first time in the world a
stereoscopic effect was obtained without spectacles, and demon-
strated to an audience of nearly 400 people.

'More than 500,000 spectators saw this amazing film. They
made enthusiastic comments. They saw birds that seem to fly
above their heads; they instinctively started back at the sight of
a ball seeming to jump out at them from the screen; they in-
voluntarily shivered at the sight of sea waves rushing down upon
them as if they were pouring out of the screen.' (B. Ivanov writing
in The Cine- Technician, July-August 1947, p. 103.)

Aurally, the artist has equal power. He can use human speech
naturally (by recording, unknown to them, the casual words of

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

actual people in conversation or the cries of real emotion), or
artificially in prepared dialogue, commentary or poetry. He can
use the sounds of nature to match their visual counterparts on the
screen, either in the confused medley of the natural world or
isolated with a sharpened emphasis. The quality of all these
sounds can be changed artificially either in the process of record-
ing or subsequently in fulfilment of the artist's needs. The face of
a man on the screen can be matched with the voice of another
human being so that the maximum dramatic effect can be
achieved. Musical instruments combined in an orchestra can be
balanced with new kinds of effect which the human ear in the
concert-hall can never be able to hear. Lastly, an unreal world of
sound, artificial and strange, can be drawn visually and repro-
duced as an entirely new aural experience.

There is no limit but the human imagination itself and the
rapidly receding barriers of the cinema's technical boundaries to
hinder the artist who possesses the desire and the means to exploit
the potentialities of the film. The barriers are rather financial than
technical, or the failing vision of men faced with such astonishing
powers. For the nature of the film is in line with the terrifying and
inspiring discoveries of its period, with atomic energy and the
revolution which has suddenly overtaken all branches of human
communications in a bare half-century. The pace is upon us: we
are called upon to achieve the progress of an era in a generation,
to expand our sense of values beyond anything which a past
generation could conceive. Our scientists and technicians have
outpaced these values and made us technical supermen before we
have learned to be wise as ordinary mankind. They have given us
the cinema and turned aside to make other discoveries. It is for us
to use this new gift in communications to help strengthen the
conception of our human nature so that it can take the strain of
our great technical discoveries and their social implications.

So far almost all philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and
other students of human affairs have neglected the cinema as if it
were only worth the attention of adolescents, journalists and
financiers. This is as wrong as it is dangerous. More recently a
French philosopher, Gilbert Cohen-Seat, has began to speculate
upon the wider long-term significance of film- communications to
the human species.

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

Cohen-Seat has made a number of interesting prophecies about
the future of the film and its possible contribution to the develop-
ment of civilization. He thinks of it as of equal significance to
printing, without which the history of the world since the
Renaissance would have been directed upon entirely different and
narrower paths, owing to the limitations which its absence would
have placed upon the spread of knowledge. For knowledge, once
communicated, increases indefinitely in the process of its propa-
gation.

'En resume, la civilisation s'est engagee, avec le cinema, dans
une de ces aventures illimitees ou se font les detours de son destin.
L'homme tenait de l'ecriture, superposee au langage, le moyen
d'une action profonde sur l'e sprit, capable de le transformer sans
cesse, d'une maniere imprevisible. Nous avons obtenu de l'elec-
tricite une promptitude d'effet et une action universelle, un
mepris de l'espace et du temps jusqu'alors inconnu. Mais Taction
electrique n'affecte immediatement que la matiere; et l'ecriture
trouve un frein dans sa lenteur, parce qu'il faut entendre les
langues, se plier a la lecture, savour lire. Le film se rend maitre de
la portee morale; il s'est empare de l'universalite et de la promp-
titude. Heritier de l'ecriture, comme elle sans dessein arrete entre
le bien et le mal, le vrai et le faux, le beau et le laid, ce jeu d'
images possede comme l'electricite une sorte de polyvalence
exceptionnelle. Quelques atomes de films, pour parler comme les
chimistes, combines avec chaque autre element de l'univers
humain, peuvent constituer aussitot quelque "ecrit", immediate-
ment et universellement intelligible. Synthese singuliere des deux
principaux produits de l'intelligence: langage et science.' (Essai
dur les Principes d'une Philosophic du Cinema- Introduction
Generate, by Gilbert Cohen- Seat, p. 35.)

Cohen-Seat suggests that if the history books of today refer to
the Renaissance as the age of printing, those of the future may
well call this the age of the film. He sees the cinema as a revolution
in human communications based on the cultural possibilities
which can come from a mass audio- visual process.

On the other hand, there are those (such as the French Catholic
philosopher and film-maker Jean Epstein) who say that the film
as a medium does not possess the necessary qualities to rival the
verbal arts. For Epstein the film, primarily a visual medium, lacks

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the introspective power of words which at their best become the
servants of reason and of the controlled emotional expression of
man when he draws closest to the ordered universality of God.
Words are the logical, classical tools of expression, the servants of
thought, the film, as a visual and photographic medium, is a
mosaic of surface pictures; it encourages man to feel himself part
of a flux of never-ending superficial sensations.

'Revolutionnaire, le cinematographe Test — essentiellement,
infiniment et d'abord — du fait de son pouvoir de faire apparaitre
partout le mouvement. Cette mobilisation generale cree un
univers ou la forme dominante n'est plus le solide qui regit
principalement l'experience quotidienne. Le monde de Fecran, a
volonte agrandi et rapetisse, accelere et ralenti, constitue le
domaine par excellence du malleable, du visqueux, du liquide.'
(La Cinema du Diable, by John Epstein, p. 45.)

I am not in agreement with this generalized attack upon the
film. There are already a number of films, both fictional and
factual, which have been conceived wholly on an introspective
plane, and have used the innate powers of the controlled use of
significant moving pictures presented in a predetermined order
and rhythm to present human thought and emotion. Such, for
example, was Carl Dreyer's silent film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc.
Similar, though in an entirely different style, was Jean Vigo's
U Atalante. Should the artist so use it, the film medium can demand
of the critic the fullest and most sensitive attention of which he is
capable. That few films so far have made a demand of this order is
no condemnation of the medium, but rather of the level on which
the mass audience persuades the commercial producer to keep it.
We do not condemn literature as such because of the pulp writing
which makes up the greater part of contemporary literary pro-
duction.

Again, we do not, or should not, condemn music because it is
primarily concerned with emotions and not ideas, or sculpture
because it relies for much of its effect on the texture of stone and
the balance of masses. Literature alone is an art solely composed
of words, but men have not placed it above music on this account.
The film shares words with literature: it can call them into play
(either spoken or written) when it feels the need for their parti-
cular powers, as in fact it continually does. But it must not be

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forgotten that films of considerable beauty and simple suggestive
power have been made without the intervention of words, such as
The Last Laugh or Menilmontant. The human face and body, the
visible world of nature and the handiwork of man are full of mean-
ing and association when presented visually to a spectator. The
fact that the film as a photographic medium does not possess a
direct access to the artificial mental processes of a fictional
character (such as the writer's analyses in, for example, A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu or a dramatist's soliloquys in, for
example, King Lear) does not mean that the film (or for that
matter the visual art of painting) is debarred from the analysis of
human character. Without resorting to the psychological symbol-
ism of Pabst's Secrets of the Soul (though this may point to a
future development in film technique), the film is well able
through the faces, gestures and words as well as the dramatic
action of its characters, to express the subtle play of mood and
feeling and thought. This is done simply in the silent film Mother,
more complexly in, for example, La Grande Illusion and Brief
Encounter. In life we depend on the physical expression, the
words and the deeds of our friends to gain an insight into their
characters. The film can present all these facets, amplified by the
astonishing resources of its technique.

There is no adequately demonstrated reason why the film
should be regarded as a technical medium unworthy of a great
artist. It is true that its so-called great productions as yet are
mainly unequal experiments, now brilliant, now subtle, now
infinitely moving, now offering some visual image as fine and
clear as the poetic imagery of Wordsworth, now strong and
sweeping with a touch of the nobility of Beethoven, but perhaps
never yet sustaining their vision in a technical form which comes
near to the rarer achievements of the greater artists of the
established media. It is the perpetual delight of the film critic to
watch for these moments of greatness and to hope that as the
curtains part before some new film it will bear the name and style
of a master. When indeed this does happen, we may be faced with
an achievement which will astonish the critics of every established
art.

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The Nature of Artistic Experiment

The nature of artistic experiment is the very history of art itself.
Here it is necessary to distinguish between modern times when by
the processes of printing, reproduction and radio performances, as
well as by the increase in travel facilities, the achievements of the
artist are made generally available to critic and public more
quickly and more extensively than was possible in the earlier
period of the manuscript codex and the mural painting. As with
other processes in civilization, the opening-up of communications
has speeded development. What took a century to achieve as a
European movement in the first decades of the Renaissance would
today take a few years only, when counter-movement succeeds
movement almost simultaneously, in, for example, painting dur-
ing the past hundred years. Experiment is now the order of the
day in all the arts, because critical public attention on a wide
scale is focused on a work of art the moment it appears. This is
particularly true of the film.

This, however, does not alter the nature of artistic experiment;
it merely alters its pace and its mood. Men experimented in earlier
centuries at leisure, and were mostly content if they and their
immediate patrons and disciples were affected by their work. The
weight of conventional patronage, when the artist was a hired
craftsman by status, must have retarded the rate of experiment
and encouraged conservatism of technique and outlook. Only
when experiment was, it might be said, in the air and feeling of a
period (as in the case of the classical period for Greek drama and
the Renaissance period for portrait painting) was the pace some-
what quickened. But at no time has the pace of artistic experi-
mentation been so rapid and so concentrated as during the past
hundred years in Europe and America. The film joined the other
artistic media at a time when its progress could be astonishingly
rapid (The Great Train Robbery, 1903; The Birth of a Nation, 1915;
Mother, 1926; October, 1928; The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928;
Kameradschaft, 1932; Song of Ceylon, 1935; The Informer, 1935; La
Grande Illusion, 1938; Le Jour se Lhve, 1939; Ivan the Terrible, 1944;
Paisa, 1946: a remarkable demonstration of artistic development
in less than fifty years).

Experiment is the desire of the artist to widen the technical

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

scope of his medium so that it becomes adequate to express the
vitality of his meaning. He is impatient at the narrow conventions
of his art, at what appear to him to be the self-imposed limitations
of his seniors. He may not recognize that they were probably at
one time as rebellious as he, and expanded the boundaries of their
art to match the burden of their own vision. So the generations
of artists join their inspiration in an endless chain whose links
widen with the years and with the pace of their progress. For
once a vision has been resolved in words or paint or musical
sounds it becomes part of every future artist's heritage. His task
is that degree more easy because this problem of expression has
been resolved; his task is seen to be more difficult only if he
accepts the challenge to go further than the last man since he
cannot be content to remain his imitator. The progress of art is
merciless; the century must be served and each new artistic
generation absorbs the achievements of its predecessors and
assumes their powers as part of its heritage.

The problem for the artist is to use the traditions of the past so
that his evolution towards the future may be firm and strong.
Few great artists have failed to make their revolution a natural
development. To part entirely with the past is to risk death in an
unfertile soil.

Even in its short span the film has shown this evolution clearly:
Porter, Griffith, Eisenstein and Pudovkin (for example) within
the silent period. Again there has been the natural inter-relation
between the thought of a period and its expression. It is a natural
step from the background of the theories which culminated in
Freud's dominance of the psychological thought of the first half
of the twentieth century, for the arts to reflect the outstanding
elements felt to derive from his account of human nature. One
result was the surrealist and avant-garde school of cinema, not-
ably developed in France, and the psychological school of cinema,
notably developed in Germany. Similarly, the ideological needs of
Soviet Russia led to the remarkable Soviet experiment in film
technique. I mention these three schools of film-making because
during the nineteen-twenties the greatest contribution to the
technical expansion of the art came from them, and it could not
have happened had there not been pressure from progressive pro-
ducers and artists to use the film-medium to serve a new range

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

of subject-matter which required subtler and stronger and more
imaginative techniques. For technical experimentation worked
out in cold blood is valueless; great innovations of technique can
only be conceived under the intense pressure of the artist's desire
to communicate his feelings and reactions to the inner meaning of
his subject.

Take the example of D. W. Griffith, whose career in films began
as an actor in 1907. Griffith, before breaking away to make The
Birth of a Nation as an independent venture (the characteristic
gesture of the true artist), had made well over 300 films of the
kind required in the period before the First World War. But
inspired by literary ambitions deriving from his admiration for
certain nineteenth- century writers he could do little in many of
these quickly-made films except express his ideas when subject
and theme allowed, and experiment generally in the technical
development of his medium. For example, he expressed something
of his ideas and sentiments in many films with social and literary
themes,* as in The Call of the Wild, After Many Years {Enoch
Arden), The Taming of the Shrew, Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven),
A Fair Exchange (Silas Marner), Pippa Passes, A Corner in
Wheat (from Frank Norris' social novel The Pit), Enoch Arden
(second version) and others. More outstanding than these were
The Battle (1911), a film of the American Civil War from the
Southern political point of view, Judith of Bethulia (1913—14), a
four-reel Biblical film made with large sets inspired by the Italian
spectacle pictures and anticipating the Judean section of In-
tolerance, The Escape (1914), a film of slum life and its problems
and The Avenging Conscience (1914) based on two stories by Poe
and notable for its psychological treatment of character. Simul-
taneously, as Griffith worked on these and other films he expanded
his technical facility and quite literally turned the motion picture
camera with its lengths of film into an artistic medium. In The
Adventures of Dollie (1908) he used the first flash-back, in For
Love of Gold he used close-shots to emphasize the acting, in After
Many Years (1908) he used the close-up itself for dramatic effect,
in Edgar Allan Poe he introduced the effect called Rembrandt
lighting for portrait work, in The Lonely Villa he used parallel

* For the information summarized in this section I am indebted to Seymour Stern's
Indices to the work of D. W. Griffith published by the British Film Institute.

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action editing at the climax of the 6tory and in Ramona (1910) he
used a long shot of landscape. The Lonedale Operator (1911) was
a great technical advance, summarized by Seymour Stern as
follows:

'Griffith here made strides in the cinematic or conjunctive
method of narration: the tempo of continuity-movement was
heightened; action-speed within the shot was increased; and very
close shots were used both for detail and suspense. The technique
of cross-cutting, also, was further developed.' (B.F.I. Index to the
Creative Work of D. W. Griffith, Part I, p. 13.)

He reached his first maturity in this film and The Battle, and
then showed that his powers were a true development of technical
style by continuous use of them in The Massacre (1912), Judith
of Bethulia, The Escape, Home Sweet Home (1914) and The
Avenging Conscience. With this wealth of experimental work
behind him, he was in full maturity as an artist and ready to take
the strain of producing his first masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation.
Similarly, von Stroheim in his early days of experiment as a
director fought to achieve a technical expansion of the medium to
express his critical view of humanity and society. He fought a
losing battle against the commercial interests of Hollywood which
by their very opposition drove him into what appeared to be
increasing extravagance and individualism. Lewis Jacobs writes
of him:

'Generally regarded as the American films' first realist, von
Stroheim was actually the culmination of a long line of realists
that ran back to Porter. Working with extreme care to achieve
the realism he wanted regardless of the box office, he was casti-
gated as an extravagant spendthrift. Had he been more willing to
compromise in his attention to details, his big expenditures would
have been condoned and exploited in publicity. Actually he made
no more box-office failures than less worthy directors; no more
money was lost on Ben Hur, for example, than on Greed. But
Hollywood steered clear of von Stroheim because it was steering
clear of reality and endorsing claptrap. His career, brilliant and
spectacular, was climaxed in his excommunication by the very
companies and individuals whom his film successes had given
major stature.' (The Rise of the American Film, p. 344.)

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There is also the very different example of Jean Vigo, whose
early death in 1934 robbed the cinema of one of its most promis-
ing artists of the first rank. Again his rebellious nature sought to
expand the film medium to make it adequate for his artistic
purposes. Vigo died with no more than a promise on the screen.
His four films were A propos de Nice (1930), Taris (1932), Zero de
Conduite (1933) and UAtalante (1934), of which the last was his
most mature work. Zero de Conduite was his most revolutionary
film in technique, born of his deep desire to condemn the futile
but terrifying tyranny of petty authority.

Artists such as these, together with the greater Soviet directors
who had the political inspiration of the Russian Revolution to
drive them on to achieve a cinema which should possess qualities
felt to match their social theme, created the true art of the film.
While others, very naturally, were using the resources of a mass
medium to give efficient entertainment to a public easily excited
by the simpler stories and easier techniques of the Hollywood
commercial film, these men struggled against the general code of
film entertainment and often enough against the exigencies of
inadequate finance, in order to make films to satisfy their needs as
artists. Their task was greatly complicated when the sound film
arrived and sent the costs of production soaring, for the film
artist soon realised that sound added greatly to the expressive
capacities of the cinema, and knew therefore that he could no
longer be satisfied by experimenting on a silent screen. Experi-
ment thereafter had to be edged into films intended for the
greater public, or freedom of expression had to be bargained for
by men like John Ford, whose prestige put him into a favourable
position to barter his talents for the price of a measure of personal
liberty. The result of such bargaining, for example, was The
Informer, one of the greatest American films. The sponsored film,
such as Soviet feature production or British documentary, can
also offer to the artist considerable freedom. Ivan the Terrible
could never have been produced as a commercial proposition:
neither could Song of Ceylon. The artists in this case are merely
concerned to satisfy their sponsors (the Soviet State film authori-
ties and the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board respectively), though
a sponsored film is valueless to its sponsor unless it is seen by
the public for which it was intended. Nevertheless, there^can

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

be such a thing as a film which influences other film-makers out of
all proportion to the extent to which it is publicly shown. This is
true of some avant-garde films. It is also true of a film like Citizen
Kane which was not popular with the greater public, but which
has left a technical mark on many a more popular production
from American studios since it was first shown.

Experiment, therefore, has been continuous in the cinema since
its inception. Generally speaking, this experiment has taken place
initially outside the broader stream of commercial production,
occurring where the artist could seize an opportunity or where it
was given to him directly in the form of sponsorship. Once
demonstrated, the less esoteric examples of new film technique
have usually been rapidly incorporated into the broader stream
of more conventional production, so that the general idiom of the
cinema has been expanded, often turning striking discoveries into
cliches by over-use. It is true to say that the less imaginative
technician feels the constant need to draw upon the creations of
his more perceptive colleagues, and even, as in the case of Holly-
wood's absorption of the German technicians of the 'twenties,
engage their services to put new life into commercial work over
which they are seldom allowed to be complete masters. The result
is that many fine imaginations have seemed to perish in Holly-
wood, or to turn to the easier paths of conventional work. It is one
of the anomalies of the history of cinema that men who have made
a distinguished contribution to the art may be found subsequently
associated with the most banal films. The psychology of the artist
is a difficult and relatively unexplored subject, but the cinema
shows only too many cases of men who descend with little
apparent protest from one grade of success to another of a lower
kind, quite possibly without even recognizing the change in the
quality of their work. The co-operative nature of film-making
may well be the cause of this: an artist flourishes with the right
partners, but sinks rapidly and unself- critically into mediocrity
once he has left his native country and become associated with a
production system of a different kind. The desire for easy fame
and money may be too much for him. However this may be, men
with only one or two good films to their credit are frequent in the
history of the cinema, especially in the past twenty years. This is
far more often the case than in the other arts, where a reputation

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

based on distinguished work is normally the result of a steady
output of a standard recognized to be the artist's best. The cinema
still shows all the unequal standards characteristic of adolescence,
though this must be credited as much to the economic complexi-
ties which lie behind its production as to the diffidence of many of
its artists.

Film in the Epic Style

The following examples of film innovation are chosen because in
one way or another they represent the expansion of technique
in the service of widening subjects, social and psychological.
Although so-called abstract films have frequently been made (for
example, the work of Oscar Fischinger and Norman McLaren) the
more important developments of the film have necessarily been
concerned in one way or another with human beings and their
problems, either presented factually in documentary or fictionally
in screenplays. Consequently these examples offer for considera-
tion different kinds of approach to their human subjects, for
which such inadequate catchwords might be used for descriptive
headings as epic (Intolerance and October), melodramatic (Jeanne
Ney, Le Jour se leve), realistic (Mother, Kamaradschaft, Paisa)
poetic (La Passion de Jeanne a" Arc, Song of Ceylon, Henry V),
surrealist (UAge a" Or) and formalist (Ivan the Terrible). The need
of the different artists concerned with making these films (all of
them highly individualistic creations) was to use the cinema to
realize their particular vision of the human scene, and in so doing
they have in different ways and in different degrees expanded the
technique of the film itself by their example.

Apart from Griffith's own Birth of a Nation (made July to
October 1914) the twenty-year-old cinema had never been used to
serious purpose in the presentation of a theme on the scale of an
epic. Concerned as it is with the subject of mankind rather than
man, revealing the spiritual values behind the rise and fall of
nations and the representation of historical periods, the epic form
has scarcely been satisfactorily produced since the great poems of
such a writer as Milton. The epic ranges over time and space in the

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

pursuit of human illustration for its great theme: a certain
simplicity of basic values is required to give it form and coherence,
and simplicity of values has not been a quality in the civilization
of recent centuries.

For Intolerance (made in twenty-two months 1915—16) Griffith
had no precedents but literary sources. Yet he realized that the
film medium possessed three great qualities which were necessary
for the epic treatment of his chosen subject of human intolerance.
First came pictorial scale, for the film could present the great
clash of forces in the settings of history: his vast Babylonian sets,
which dominated a site of 254 acres, offered a spectacle equal to
the theme, and showed the human individual reduced to an
insignificant unit in the great pattern of events. Second came
rhythm, inseparable from the great epic in its formal presentation
of history as an evolutionary phase, a plan in the mind of God.
The epic moves to its climax, stately in its rhythmic reflection of
time and established spiritual order. Lastly, the film, like the
bards of old, possessed the attention of the people: the epic theme
was always a theme born of the people as a race, and Griffith
believed passionately in the relevance of his theme to his own
times. For this reason he used the technical capacities of the
cinema to fuse present with past, and revealed for the first time
the mastery of the medium over time and space.

The famous last section of the film, when Babylon is stormed,
Christ is crucified, the French Protestants die on St. Bartholo-
mew's Day and a young American worker is almost hanged
through a miscarriage of modern justice, used the sheer physical
capacities of the film to merge these actions into one and to create
as a result a fusion impossible in any other medium. The verbal
descriptions of literature (the only other medium which could
have attempted this composite feat of narrative) would have been
too slow and too detailed to have achieved the tornado of inter-
related detail which the quick cutting in visual rhythm, possible
to the cinema, compressed into twenty minutes at the end of
Intolerance. The following description suggests something of the
effect created by Griffith's editing :

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

From Intolerance

The siege of Belshazzar's Babylon by the Persian Emperor
Cyrus is begun by the advance of great mobile towers with draw-
bridges to drop onto the walls. The camera watches them now
from outside the city, now from the great parapets themselves.
Meanwhile the colossal image of the god Ishtar is faced by
desperate worshippers who invoke his ineffectual aid to save
Babylon. The defenders pour down burning oil on the Persians,
while the invading Emperor Cyrus commands the attack from his
chariot. The besiegers' scaling ladders propped against the walls
are flung down; bodies fall from the height of the parapet; a huge
battering-ram is swung by Persian soldiers backwards and for-
wards against the gates; the camera rises slowly up the side of one
of the towers. Men fall and die in close-shot. Then while Ishtar's
worshippers continue their supplications, the Persian catapults
come into action. One of the towers collapses, and men fall alive
from its structure and from the parapets. The walls are burning,
and the scenes of fire are coloured purple. The camera, high above
the crowds, watches the battle; then suddenly we are in the heart
of the hand-to-hand fighting: a man's head is cut from his body.
A tower catches fire; the worshippers of Ishtar praise the God for
his apparent goodness. From the sky above the great steps the
camera gradually descends to earth and hovers over the crowded
steps themselves; then it mounts slowly above the throngs of
people: this is one of the greatest panoramic shots of the film.*

The action changes over to the Court of Charles where he is
signing the death warrant of the Protestant Huguenots. Next
comes the trial scene in the contemporary story: the moment of
sentence arrives and the face of the innocent man's wife reveals
the intensity of her passionate suffering. She weeps and bites her
handkerchief: we see the fingers of one hand crushing the flesh of
the other. As sentence of death is pronounced on her innocent
husband, Christ is seen on the way to Calvary. The face of the
wife holds its tragic expression: the whole situation is epitomized
by intense close-ups.

The Persian armies advance in great hordes in the deep blue of
the night. The massacre of St. Bartholomew's night fills the

* Griffith used a captive balloon to obtain some of his most extensive shots.

3 33

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screen: Christ mounts Calvary: Cyrus's horsemen move along the
banks of a river: the innocent prisoner in the American jail
receives the last sacrament as the car carrying his wife with a
reprieve rushes on to stop the execution: Babylon falls: Christ
dies on Calvary: the innocent boy's life hangs on a moment of time
as the executioners stand by with their knives ready to cut the
tapes which will put him to death. Every action merges. When all
the rest perish, symbols of the result of man's intolerance, the boy
alone is saved by his wife's devotion.

Griffith is the first and the greatest experimenter in the film
largely because so much of what he did became the basis for the
experiments of those following him. Pudovkin acknowledges this
debt to Griffith throughout his book Film Technique.

It was Eisenstein, however, who developed most logically the
work of Griffith in Intolerance. In October (1928; and now no
longer politically acceptable to the Soviet authorities) Eisenstein
made the most ambitious of the Soviet silent films in celebration
of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Its second title, Ten
Days that Shook the World, announces its epic scale; the scope of its
action is large; it uses the full resources of the silent cinema and
its capacity for spectacle and for the rhythmic presentation of
mass-movements to create a film in all senses above the normal.
Taking his cue from Griffith, but possessing a more complex and
subtle sense of formal design, Eisenstein developed his interpreta-
tion of history as a literal pattern of events, contrasting through
the editing principle carefully chosen details with the broadest
survey of the action, as in the case of the famous sequence of the
great drawbridge opening to prevent the revolutionaries escaping
from the bullets of the Czarist troops. This event is stressed by the
inter-relation of shots of a dead horse suspended by its harness
hanging from one span of the tilting bridge until finally it falls, a
distant white form dropping far down into the water below, and
shots of a dead woman whose streaming hair lies across the part-
ing spans of the bridge.* Among a number of outstanding sections
of the film which will always remain a part of the history of the
silent cinema is that which shows Kerensky's coming to power as
head of the Provisional Government :

* An analysis of this sequence will be found in Lewis Jacobs' Rise of the American Film,
pp. 317-18.

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

From October

The perspective of a great vaulted hall of the Winter Palace is
seen, down which Kerensky marches, back to the camera which is
tilted so that the ornate columns and ceiling fill the frame. Then
the camera moves to the first level of the grand ornamental stair-
case at the far end of the hall; Kerensky's climbing jackboots
mount away from the camera at tread level. The camera moves
up two more turns of the stairway: Kerensky climbs towards us.
The whole mid-section of the staircase is seen, regal, imposing,
palatial. 'Commander-in-Chief (title). A still vaster shot shows
the tiny military figure still climbing alone. 'Minister of War and
Marine' (title). The vast views change as the figure continues to
climb, symbolically mounting to power. He is followed at respect-
ful distance by his attaches. 'Prime Minister' (title). The ornate
balustrades, the chandeliers, the great angles of the architectural
staircase itself all become emphasized by their formal composition
into symbols of power. 'Et cetera: Et cetera: Et cetera' (title).
Various close shots are seen of statues with wreaths in their
hands: they wait for the dictator on the stairs. 'Hope of the
Country and the Revolution' (title). A huge tilted shot of a statue
with wreath up-raised to crown the dictator: montage-scenes of
this emphasizing the act of crowning. 'Alexander Fedorovitch
Kerensky' (title). Big close-ups of Kerensky's bowed and solemn
face lit from above and shots of the statue with up-raised wreath
alternate. The figures still mount the staircase. 'The Tzar's own
footmen' (title). Kerensky passes a formal line of servants
grouped on the stairs. The statue with its wreath appears in ever
more imposing tilted shots. A high officer salutes Kerensky with
gross, smiling respect: Kerensky gravely responds in close-shot.
The figures hold their salutes in close-shots; then break their pose
and shake hands. The handshake is prolonged. Kerensky turns
away regally (tilted shot): he pauses, and then passes down the
line of servants. He shakes hands with a servant. 'WHAT a
democrat!' (title). He passes on: the procession of attaches follows.
'The Democrat stands on the mat' (title). The figure of Kerensky
stands formally and stiffly in front of two great ornate doors,
symbols of power and office. A servant smiles admiringly.
Kerensky's great boots stand masterfully apart. His gloved hands
are clasped behind his back. The door is seen with its ornate

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

crests and ironwork. The servants smile and nod to each other.
Kerensky grips and shakes his gloves commandingly. He changes
the posture of his feet. The servants smile and laugh. A mech-
anical peacock shakes its head. Close-up of Kerensky's masterful
military boots. The peacock's tail rises, and it twirls round and
round. The doors swing open regally, and Kerensky marches in,
his boots striding forward. The attaches follow quickly: the ser-
vants laugh approvingly. The peacock rotates and twirls. The
great bolts on the door are seen in close-up.

The scene shifts to the waiting Bolsheviks recumbent outside,
and there follows a montage of the waiting city and of the rising
sun near the little encampment where Lenin bides his time. Mean-
while in the Winter Palace an elaborate montage of crests, plate,
hangings and luxurious furnishing all associated with the Tsarist
family introduces Kerensky, who is working in the vaulted
library of Nicholas II. He studies the decree restoring the death
penalty. He signs it, leaves the library by a staircase followed by
the turning heads of his officers. A statue of Napoleon with folded
arms stands white and glistening. An officer salutes. Another shot
of Napoleon is followed by a montage of shots of wine-glasses and
decanters drawn up in formal and shining lines on a polished
table; they are followed by shots of toy soldiers drawn up in neat
rows. The hands of Kerensky play with a decanter which is con-
structed in four sections: his hands bring out the cap, which is
seen to be in the form of a Tzarist coronet. Immediately a factory
siren sounds with a burst of white steam. 'The Revolution in
danger!' Kerensky contemplates the orb. The siren sounds again
with its jets of steam: a title interset announces 'General Kornilov
is advancing!' In the midst of a mass of rushing armed men come
the titles 'AH hands to the defence of Petrograd!' and 'Kornilov
advancing!' Montage of siren steam. 'For God and Country'
(title). 'GOD' (title). Montage of Orthodox Church splendour
leading into Oriental statuettes of pagan deities and mosque-like
architecture. Smoke rises before a Buddha. The fierce toothed
head of a dragon-like Oriental statue. A fat Chinese Buddha: the
horrific masks of Eastern dancers. Masks of actors, and the
barbaric formalism of negroid statuary, followed by primitive
sculptured figures. 'COUNTRY' (title). Montage of medals,
epaulettes, decorations and orders. 'HURRAH' (title). In reverse

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movement the great statue of the Tsar hauled down and smashed
by the people at the beginning of the film leaps back into its place
piece by piece in semi-slow motion. There follows a quick montage
of shots of laughing deities as the statue reassembles. The head
wobbles into place: the orb and sceptre are re-established. Rapid
flashing montage of imperial and clerical architectures and
symbols: the priest celebrating mass. We look up at a figure on
horse-back. 'General Kornilov' (title). Statue of Napoleon on
horseback. Montage of Napoleon and the Tsar's orb. Kerensky
folds his arms, 'Two Bonapartes' (title). Two statuettes of
Napoleon face each other closer and closer in quickly-cut montage,
contrasted momentarily with two of the most primitive-style of
the previous statuettes. Quick montage of curious god-like Eastern
statues. Kornilov on horseback raises his hand in salute. At once
a great caterpillar tractor rises up symbolically on a mound. A
flash of Napoleon. Kerensky flings himself face-downwards onto
a couch. The statuette of Napoleon is smashed as the great
symbolic tractor crashes down the side of the mound. The
October Revolution has begun.

The Film and Human Character

While artists such as Griffith and Eisenstein were developing the
technical capacity of the cinema to represent concepts on the
epic scale, other artists, notably Pudovkin, Pabst and Dreyer
among some few more were in various ways discovering what
could be done by the film in the representation of more detailed
human issues. Whilst the epic was concerned only with the
individual if he were a great leader or a representative of mankind
as a whole, stories involving a psychological approach to the raw
material of humanity concentrated on the individual for his own
sake. If the German film concentrated on the individual in melo-
dramatic circumstances and the Russian film on the individual in
ideological circumstances, Dreyer in his unique study of Joan in
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc was concerned solely with the
objective analysis of the last agonized hours of a tortured girl.

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The Love of Jeanne Ney (G. W. Pabst, 1927) is a melodrama, a
spy story based on a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg. In its concentra-
tion on situation and atmosphere, it shares a quality of most
melodrama, namely, the non-realistic use of character in which
human beings are part of the atmosphere of the series of situations
involved, rather than the promoters of the action as in normal
life. Characters in melodrama do not develop and change and
fluctuate and react like characters realistically conceived and
portrayed from actuality. They are rather functionaries in a pre-
conceived plot, and however detailed the presentation of them
they remain functionary-types rather than evolving human
beings. That is one reason why they degenerate so readily into
lay-figures, or can be written-up to fit the star-types represented
by actors such as Boris Karloff or, more subtly, by the melo-
dramatic artistry of a Fritz Rasp.

The Love of Jeanne Ney is one of the finest of the screen's melo-
dramas, and its technical mastery shows a stage in the develop-
ment of Pabst which he was later to supersede in such films as
Westfront, 1918, and Kameradschaft. But in The Love of Jeanne
Ney his craftsmanship is superb, possessing a degree of atmo-
sphere and type character- drawing that demonstrated the facility
with which the film medium could create melodramatic tension.
Melodrama depends largely on timing and the calculated elements
of suspense and surprise, the very elements that editing can build
up so effectively with its hypnotic hold on the viewer's attention.
Pabst's development of these elements was meticulous. Iris Barry
writes on one particular sequence in the film:

'It might be useful to consider one sequence in detail — that in
which Khalibiev sells the list of Bolshevist agents to Ney. It lasts
about three minutes. It contains not a single title. It says all there
is to say about the two men and about the momentary relation-
ship. How is it done? Though one is hardly conscious of move-
ment, the camera is constantly shifting, although it is no longer
used like a toy with new-found uses which must be displayed, but
with the instinctive movements of psychological necessity.
Though one is scarcely aware of a single cut, there are forty in this
short scene — needless to say, the director cut and edited the film
himself. Every camera position chosen unerringly, every cut
made unobtrusively, every movement of the actors natural

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because it corresponds to a feeling within, the whole composition
smooth yet fluid — such is a typical piece of Pabst's discontinuous
style of continuity.'

When melodrama reaches this pitch of technical accomplish-
ment one turns immediately to the contribution so flexible a
medium has to offer where the realistic presentation of human
character is attempted. It is here that both the cinema and the
theatre meet their severest challenge. The stock character has
always been easy to represent, because so many of his human
qualities are visibly apparent in expression, gait, costume and in
the standardized reactions and phrases of his speech. He can be
coarsely or subtly drawn according to the degree of skill which
is involved in portraying him. But he possesses no subconscious
mind: he does not require that curious amalgamation of desires
and motivations with which real humanity is endowed. But the
realistic character is difficult to create and difficult to act. The
novelist has the advantage of avoiding the representation of his
characters through public performance by artistes whose own
temperaments stand between creator and viewer. Also, and this
is pointed out frequently enough, the novelist can enter into the
minds of his characters and present their motivation from within,
whilst in the theatre and the film all this must be implied by
gesture, dialogue, discussion and action, the observable means
which we employ when dealing with each other in life itself. The
sound film has added the subtlety of speech to the visualized
character, whereas the silent film had to break the continuity of
its images in order to convey by writing the dialogue spoken in
the course of the visible action. Although this, like so much else
in the arts, became an easily accepted convention, it nevertheless
destroyed immediacy and continuity of reaction, both between
the characters themselves on the screen and between characters
and viewers.

Nevertheless, the psychological film did appear before sound
entered the medium though mostly merged with melodrama (as in
Pabst's film), but more rarely in a purely realistic form, such as
Mother (Pudovkin, 1926) or La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Dreyer,
1928). On re-viewing, these and the few films similar to them in
purpose seem the least dated of the silent films. Because their
interest centres on the true representation of character, they

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depend far less than the melodramas on the accidents of fashion
and contemporary social habits, which are the elements that
usually date a film most obviously. They depend rather on the
technical ingenuity of the artist to expand the medium so that it
serves with reasonable faithfulness the people of his imagination.
The conception of realistic character was necessarily simpler in
the period of the silent film, concentrating on essentials only, but
nevertheless Pudovkin in Mother, aided by the superb acting skill
of the actress Baranovskaya, showed what could be done to
absorb the attention of the spectator into the moral dilemma of a
woman which entirely reorientates her character and outlook.
His books Film Technique and Film Acting are vitally concerned
with these very problems, and he ceaselessly experimented with
his medium to make it more adaptable to their solution. The
following description of the scenes in Mother which lead up to the
arrest of the son show great care in constructing the narrative
visually so that the emotions of the leading characters will be
suitably balanced and emphasized :

From Mother

The Mother, her face lined and anxious, crouches on the wooden
floor, lifts the loose boards and takes out the hidden weapons
wrapped in a cloth. When the door swings open, the Mother
replaces the weapons hastily, all in close-shot. The two boot soles
of a man being carried in come towards her, emphasized large and
viewed as the Mother would see them from her position on the
floor. The men from the works are bringing back the body of her
husband, killed in the strike of which the Son is a leader: the
Mother clasps her hands nervously and touches her face, knowing
deep trouble is approaching her. The dead horizontal face of her
husband fills the screen. The Mother waves her hand up and
down nervously, her sorrow dawning. Meanwhile the drums beat,
the soldiers march out of the factory, formal and disciplined, seen
from roof level. The Mother kneels by the bier of her husband in
the shadowed light, the body covered with a white sheet: her head
is shawled, her darkened eyes are wide and staring. There are
other women with her who try to comfort her and break the
immobility of her sorrow, but flash-back shots show that she is
thinking of the weapons beneath the floorboard: they might only

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too easily have been the ones which killed her husband. Outside,
the Son makes a run for it from the factory. He comes through the
door: he sees his Mother by the bier: they look at each other in
alternating shots which build up to a climax when close-ups of the
body itself are introduced: a brief shot of the floorboards is
sufficient to remind us of what the Mother is thinking. The Son
starts forward to go to the hiding-place of the weapons. The
Mother's eyes open in a terrible stare: quick shots of the body
record the shock to her feelings. She rushes up to the Son, and
falls, clutching his legs. The shots grow quicker, the Mother cling-
ing to her son's foot, a protecting hand held out in close-up. The
Son breaks away and rushes out, but returns as a friend arrives
announcing the coming of the military, who enter into the house
hurriedly: their Officer, gloved and meticulous, stands looking at
the Mother over his spectacles; she is still crouched where she was
left on the floor. The soldiers' faces are still: close-ups of the many
people now in the room, soldiers, workers and women, build up
the tension of the situation. The Officer begins the interrogation
formally: he demands the guns: he glances up and down, his face
narrow and cruel behind his spectacles. The Son stands defiant
and anxious. Their faces alternate on the screen, the Son, the
Mother, the Officer: the tension is drawn out, the implied silence
terrible: the faces on the screen grow in size. The Officer orders the
house to be searched, and smokes a cigarette. Meanwhile at
Military Headquarters evidence arrives that the Son is guilty.
The Mother bows low to the Officer, who departs dissatisfied that
his search has proved fruitless. But the police, with their new
evidence, return to arrest the Son. The Mother offers to give up
the guns to the Superior Officer if they will let her son go free.
The Superior Officer's brutal face fills the screen in profile. The
tension is again built up by quickly alternated shots of the pro-
tagonists' faces, the Officer, the Son and the Mother. The Mother
rushes to the loose boards and gives up the hidden guns: the Son
stands tense: he knows they will not spare him. The Officer's
gloved fingers stroke his knuckles in close shot: there is a struggle;
the Son is hustled out, and the Mother is left on the floor supplica-
ting, pathetic, struck down by the accumulation of adversity.

The Passion of Joan of Arc, coming at the very end of the

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period of the silent film, depends even less on action than Mother
to express the motivation of character. Its settings, though
aesthetically effective, are simple to the point of bareness, and the
whole concentration of the film is on character as revealed by the
human face. Once more the importance of the quality of the
acting is evident. However much the director is in charge of how
the performance of an artiste is viewed, and of the tempo of the
images which contain a record of it, in the end a great part of the
individual emotional feeling conveyed will depend on the human
being we are watching with such privileged intimacy. There must
be no faltering by Baranovskaya or Falconetti in the final chosen
images, however much they may have failed in the images
rejected on the cutting bench. The director guides the artiste and
controls the viewpoint of her performance, but if the performance
itself is faulty and without emotional sincerity, no amount of
technique can mend it. The following is a description of the main
elements in one of the scenes when the peasant girl Joan faces the
persecution of her inquisitors:

From The Passion of Joan of Arc

Joan, her hair short and matted about her ears, her slight worn-
out body dressed in a belted jerkin, coarse soldier's breeches and
worn leather boots which come up to her knees, is brought from
her cell to face her judges in the place of torture. She stands in
the little doorway facing the great cowled figures tonsured and in-
tolerant: they sit or stand in a silent group in the foreground of
the bare, white-walled room. Everything is neatly in order for the
torture, the strapped chair, the line of saws and pincers, the great
wheel, the spiked rollers. A judge appeals in close-shot that she
should renounce her revelation (title): his face seems not unkindly.
But Joan has seen the instruments of torture: her lips part, her
nostrils widen, her eyes are wide. A harsher face demands that
she acknowledge the devil has led her astray: a huge, demoniac
face of another judge fills the screen, shouting at her. Her ex-
pression combines amazement, disgust and fear. The kinder face
is harsh now, with pursed lips and frowning forehead: another,
more gaunt, more wild, demands her recantation with a beating
fist. Joan's head is thrown back: she is alone with her belief in her
visions, and her face expresses the intensity of her search for

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spiritual help. Her hand falters in close-up; a monkish forefinger
points to the place on the document of recantation where she
must make her mark. She finds the strength not to sign: a savage
monk seizes her wrist and screams at her in anger, trying to force
her to recant. Then comes the vision of torture, shared by Joan
and the viewer. The spiked rollers turn: Joan looks in fear over
her shoulder: the toothed saws make fantastic patterns: Joan's head
is flung back in terror : the torture wheel hangs on the wall: a climax
of these images of physical pain comes when Joan falls to the ground
in a faint. She is carried out by the torturers and laid on her bed.

Falconetti's impeccable artistry, the complete conviction with
which she fulfilled the part of Joan as it was required for this
film, combined with the most careful selection of the actors who
played the Inquisitors and Judges enabled Dreyer to concentrate
upon a technique of narrative through close-shot. The spell is only
broken by the many necessary titles. Dreyer told me he felt the
need for the spoken as against the written word: he was, he said,
working at the time on the border of the silent and sound film. On
the other hand, he does not wish sound to be added to the film as
it now stands. It is conceived with the minimum of utterance
possible, and although it has been proposea that sound should be
put to the film Dreyer has rightly refused. There is not enough
said during the action to make a satisfactory sound film. It would
seem bare and empty of speech, the images too long. Nevertheless,
the psychological detail of the film brings it very near to the
technique of the sound medium.

The Film in the Poetic Style

To use the literary word poetry of a work of film art has its
dangers, because each art produces its own varying levels of
creative work, and poetry is used as a generic term covering the
highest level of presentation of emotional experience within
certain limits of artistic form which belong naturally and properly
to a word-medium. Keats writes of the song of the nightingale:

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'Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'

(Ode to the Nightingale)
In this poem the emotional experience conveyed is as much due
to the formal relationship of the words themselves and the powers
of suggestion such richly-vague words contain for the human
imagination as it is due to the initial state of mind which caused
the poet to write his verse. The idioms, rhythm, and imagery of
word-art are not, of course, appropriate to film-art. Nevertheless,
the use of the term poetry is often extended to describe the more
profoundly emotional kind of film. A poetic film is presumably
one which raises in the viewer qualities of emotion he has pre-
viously identified with poetic literature. The fact that the visual-
aural medium of the film will create its own experience in the
viewer, an experience which is of a different kind from that of
literature, does not mean that its powers of suggestion are less
vivid or less profound than those of literature. In this sense the
value of the experience given by La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc need
not be considered less poetic than a poem about the sufferings of
this bewildered peasant-girl, confronted and tortured by the
organized power of religious orthodoxy.

Poetry in the widest artistic sense can therefore be said to exist
in any work which achieves an unusually high level in its power
to move the emotions of the beholder, and stir in him knowledge
and understanding of human fife. There can be no universal
agreement about the standards, delimitations and objects of such
emotional experience: artists, philosophers, critics and general
public will debate all this till doomsday, whilst admitting to the
rank of poet and artist a few outstanding names in the various
fields of artistic achievement. I have already said that the film
has not yet evolved its Shakespeare. But it has already begun to
evolve its poetry, in some instances of a most unusual kind (as in
the best work of the avant-garde movement in France), in others
(for example, Song of Ceylon or Ivan the Terrible) along fines more
commonly recognizable as a poetic approach to their subjects.

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UAge (TOr is a surrealist film, and true surrealism (often latent
in the artist's view of human experience) has merely developed as
a self-conscious movement in the contemporary arts because the
twentieth century has recognized psychology as part of the stock-
in-trade of science and civilization. The artistic products of true
surrealism might be described as a formal purge of the artist's
emotional experience, whether gay and facetious (Paul Klee) or
grave and horrific (Max Ernst and Salvador Dali). The imagery
of surrealism cannot by the nature of its origin always be sub-
jected to a satisfactory intellectual analysis: the secret places of
the mind can as yet only be glimpsed, not explored. The true
surrealist movement in the arts is a natural emotional outcome
of an age preoccupied with and fascinated by the experimental
discoveries and theories of psychology.

UAge (TOr (made by Luis Bufiuel in 1930 in association with
Salvador Dali) contains a sequence which can be verbally
described as follows :

From VAge (TOr

A number of Bishops in full robes are seen chanting on a rough,
craggy rock by the sea. Meanwhile a bandit with a gun stands
watching them, listening to the music and the chanting and the
noise of the waves. The bandit is exhausted and oppressed, and
he staggers slowly away.

Elsewhere in a barn there is a gathering of bandits, all in a
state of complete exhaustion and decrepitude. The door opens,
and the bandit of the rocks comes in. The group then takes up
arms and leaves its shelter to crawl and struggle over the rocks,
deserting on its way the man who had come to summon it, who has
collapsed with exhaustion. All this action is accompanied by music.

A number of rowing boats arrives in the neighbouring harbour.
The boats are full of civic dignitaries who proceed up the rocks.
All they find are the skeletons of the Bishops on the eminence by
the sea: their bones are still covered by the tattered remnants of
their fine robes. The lay members of the procession take off their
hats in tribute to these remains, but when the speeches begin the
ceremony is violently interrupted by an attempted rape by a
distraught man nearby. But the ceremony continues formally as
the man concerned is led away struggling, crushing a black beetle

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in his path and kicking at a dog which had harked at him. (This
completes an episode in the film.)

The protest by the two artists Salvador Dali and Luis Bufiuel
against certain deeply-resented phases of their experience of life
and its institutions took on this allusive, imagistic form: they
conjure the film's action and the visual images, as the practitioner
of black magic once conjured the fearful imaginings of a medieval
devilry or induced the dreams of primitive men terrified by the
dark forces they felt were haunting their primeval forests.

UAge (TOr is one of the rare films which reveal the powerful
resources of the cinema to stir the undiscovered imagery of the
unconscious mind. The cinema, because it is a photographic
medium, has mainly served the realistic aspects of life, recording
faithfully the surface of things as they are, or as the more
privileged sections of the community have tended to make them
for their exclusive use. But a few significant experiments in the
history of the cinema have suggested the possibilities of the
medium in the creation of psychological imagery. Pabst's Secrets
of the Soul was a notable example. Hochbaum's Der Ewige Maske
was another attempt at dream action, as well as films in the
French avant-garde movement such as Germaine Dulac's The
Seashell and the Clergyman, Cocteau's Sang d'un Poete and Vigo's
Zero de Conduite. The various forms of animated film, for example
Bartosch's emotional political work Uldee or Alexieff's curiously
horrific Night on a Bare Mountain, also suggest new kinds of
imaginative creation open to the artist of the cinema who is not
concerned to use solely realistic actions and backgrounds to
achieve his effects. Even the commercialized cinema has recog-
nized these powers and made uncertain attempts to incorporate
them in such films as Hitchcock's Spellbound, where, however, the
dream imagery and symbolism devised by Dali himself were
vulgarized and over-emphasized in order not to tax too sorely the
imagination of the greater public. The technical masterpieces of
Disney have on occasion reached a far higher imaginative level,
notably in moments of horror or violence. What is interesting is
that in more recent years films which have to be scripted and
designed to suit mass tastes have not felt obliged to reject non-
realistic elements in their treatment.

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The documentary branch of the cinema has also shown its
appreciation of the importance of film-poetry. Documentary has
either been created to satisfy the artistic individualism of its makers
or has been produced as part of a recognized public information and
propaganda service such as exists in countries like Britain and
Soviet Russia, where the factual film is either wholly or sub-
stantially sponsored by the State. Cavalcanti's Rien que les
Heures (1926) and Ruttmann's Berlin: the Symphony of a City
(1927) assembled the images of life in these cities in order to
create a purely subjective mood and atmosphere, and to exploit
rhythmic patterns of movement within individual shots, or in the
general continuity and timing of the shots when assembled in
sequence. The great Soviet documentaries Turksib (Turin, 1928)
and Earth (Dovzhenko, 1930) also aimed at the building up of
atmosphere rather than at that intellectual analysis of a subject
characteristic of British documentary. This is also the approach
of the notable documentaries of Flaherty (especially in Moana)
and Pare Lorentz: the latter in The Plow that Broke the Plains and
The River uses a form of blank verse commentary presenting
facts, figures and names in a rhythmic style which heightens and
concentrates their emotional effect received in combination with
the flow of images on the screen. This effect might not unfittingly
be called poetic. British documentary also is not without examples
of the poetic treatment. Song of Ceylon (1934) made by Basil
Wright remains an outstanding work in our national cinema for
its sustained poetic quality. Whereas most films which aim at a
poetic effect do so with a certain rhetorical deliberation (as in
Pare Lorentz's documentaries), Wright experimented with more
subtle references and shades of meaning. His sympathy with his
subject enabled him to use quite simple visual imagery, words,
sounds and music which, in the manner of the poet, he combined
to create a rich suggestion of meaning. His commentator, Lionel
Wendt of Ceylon, in a distant and impersonal voice uses the fine,
dignified seventeenth- century prose of the writer Robert Knox.
This gives the action on the screen, when the Singalese men and
women climb the mountain on a holy day, or sit listening to the
recital of their scriptures by a priest, a strange combined quality
of immediacy (in the picture) and ancient tradition (in the rhythm
and phrasing of the richly-worded prose). Similarly the late Walter

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Leigh's music for the film is rich in atmosphere rather than merely
curious, like most Western assimilations of Eastern musical tones
and rhythms. One of the most beautiful moments in the film is the
image of the bells and the bird:

From Song of Ceylon

A procession is seen climbing a mountain path to take part in a
Buddhistic ritual. The sense of growing anticipation is intensified
by the voices of the climbers, by the atmospheric music, by the
sight of the older people resting on the way while a reader pre-
pares them for worship, and the voice we hear recites in English
the beautiful words of praise of the Prophet. When dawn comeswe
are high up the mountain, and the people are singing. The singing
strengthens in feeling, and the impression of a rising excitement
increases. The great image of the Buddha is constantly seen, and
a series of bell-notes begins to echo down the mountain-side with a
rising intensity. The bells combine into a varied music of their
own, and a bird is startled into flight over the water, the camera
following it until the images of the bird, the Buddha, the moun-
tain-side, the water and the trees are combined together, and the
resonance of the rising bell-notes sounded at intervals culminates
in a feeling of ecstasy and worship.

There can be no doubt about the future capacities of the cinema
when in its formative period it is shown capable of such subtle,
emotional and powerful imagery as this.

The Film in the Formal Style

While the film poet is seeking to expand the medium of the cinema
for his purposes, the designer or draughtsman of motion pic-
tures has already shown considerable creative maturity in certain
outstanding films. The work of Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein
can be singled out for the way in which decor (in the fullest mean-
ing of the whole design of a film, its formal presentation) has been
made more than an effective pictorial frame for the action, but a
dynamic part of the action itself. In Lang's earlier films such as

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Destiny, Siegfried and more especially Metropolis, the whole
character of the work could be described as formalist: much of the
effect of these films on the viewer derived from their sheer
pictorial values. In more recent times Eisenstein's Ivan the
Terrible (Part I, made in 1945 at the Alma At a Studios in
Kazahkstan) has given us an outstanding example of a film quite
away from the normal in its unrealistic use of formal design to
achieve a calculated effect. This formalism is even extended to
the acting and beyond that to the characterization itself.

There will always be critics who are alienated by what appears
to them to be the inhumanity of such a formal treatment of
human creatures in action. Yet this treatment is very close to the
epic in subordinating the naturalistic presentation of human
character to one which interprets human beings as elements in
the general pattern of events seen in an historical perspective.
For our purposes Ivan the Terrible is a significant film because it
has endeavoured to widen the range of the cinema in a direction
little in favour with ordinary public taste today. The critic Ivor
Montagu has called Eisenstein's formalism Miltonic: the human-
ism of a Shakespeare is more in fashion today, culminating in the
details of individual psychology with which our most character-
istic and important literature and films are preoccupied. For this
reason alone, its very isolation in the field of experiment, Eisen-
stein's work is significant. The coronation sequence from Ivan the
Terrible, Part One, will illustrate the stress on the formal element,
emphasized by the archaic Russian of the simplified dialogue, the
rich architectural simplicity of the sets and the barbaric pageantry
of Prokofiev's musical score. I wrote in the following terms
about the film in general and this sequence in particular soon after
I had seen the film for the first time:

To emphasize the great theme of Russian unification under a
progressive monarch and his final triumph against the Boyars
with the support of the common people, Eisenstein had the
cameras of Moskvin and Tisse and the musical score of Prokofiev.
Tisse has been his cameraman since Strike which they made
together in 1924. Prokofiev had worked with Eisenstein on
Alexander Nevsky. Eisenstein is his own set-designer. This team
of artists produces astonishing collective results, the combined

4 49

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powers of photography, music and montage which merge in the
all-embracing film medium. An example is the carefully con-
structed sequence of the coronation in which long shots of the
whole cathedral are alternated with remarkable portrait close-
ups, the heads of the chief actors, and the heads, framed in
gigantic white ruffs, of the old and cunning ambassadors of
Western Europe. Ivan is crowned without emphasis on the
individual: the back of his head and his hands receiving the
symbol of office are all that are shown. A voice of astonishing bass
echoing quality rises in quarter tones with a paean of thanks-
giving. The Emperor turns and the ritual shower of coins is
poured over his head and splashes to the ground in a stream of
dancing light. The women smile, and the huge menacing heads of
the Boyars threaten the young Czar. Only after all this play with
music, ritual and symbolic portraiture does Ivan announce his
challenge to the old powers in plain and ringing speech. (British
Film Institute's Records of the Film Series.)

In the British cinema only the unique experiment of Sir
Laurence Olivier's Henry V has attempted a formalism of treat-
ment similar to the work of Eisenstein. It showed more especially
the influence of Alexander Nevsky (1938), notably in the exciting
pictorial design and editing of the battle sequences. Henry Falso
enjoyed the advantages of a subtle and powerful musical score by
William Walton: in a film of this kind music can play a larger
creative part, for realism is put aside and the arts of sound and
image combine their strength to capture the imagination of the
viewer with a vision of a world which exists only in the artist's
imagination. What a subtle play of imaginative effect is added by
Walton in a few notes of music here and there, colouring the
pauses between the uttered lines of Shakespeare's verse.* What
a vigorous excitement is added to the visually presented charge
and engagement of the French Knights in battle by the growing
momentum of the music which accompanies the action, and which
is finally resolved in a quivering rush of sound as the British
arrows range up into the air, and the crash of hand-to-hand battle
takes over from the orchestral instruments !

Henry V was also an experiment in decor. Adverse comment

* Readers should at this point play records H.M.V. C 3583-6 illustrating verse and
music from the film Henry V.

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has been made upon its combination of natural location back-
grounds (as for example in the battle scenes) and formal settings
deriving their design and in some instances their perspective from
medieval paintings. It was correct for the framing sequences taking
place at the beginning and end of the film in the Elizabethan
playhouse to be naturalistically presented, but it was incon-
sistent to combine the realistic and non-realistic background
once the play had been raised, as it were, from the level of a
performance actually taking place in the theatre to a unique
action taking place only for the film. Henry V also raises the issue
in its extremest form of whether the lines of a dramatist written
in verse for the highly rhetorical theatre of the Renaissance could
survive the photographic medium of the screen with its stress on
intimacy. The answer to this problem can only be a relative one.
Where the stress of the lines is upon the intimate, personal
revelation of a character, the close presence of the camera can
help the actor deliver his lines with a subtlety impossible on the
stage, notably in soliloquy. Where the stress of the lines empha-
sizes a colourful pageantry of action, the cinema is a freer medium
than the stage to give full rein to spectacle and movement.
Where, however, individual character takes second place to the
complicated imagery of great dramatic verse, the emphatic visual
image on the screen steals too high a proportion of the viewer's
attention which should at such times be mainly aural. Shake-
speare's very mobile stage-craft suits the medium of the cinema:
so does his Renaissance humanism of character-drawing. But no
poet depending on complex verbal effects can hope he will win
through in a medium which is primarily visual in its emphasis.
Hence, artistically speaking, Henry V was a film of numerous
great moments rather than satisfying as a whole: so much of it
needed the distance and verbal emphasis of the stage. The
artificial decor, however, and the close scoring of Walton's music
both helped considerably to establish the right kind of intensified
atmosphere necessary for the verse speech of the dialogue.
Sequence after sequence justified the experiment of making the
film, the opening scene in the French court, with the camera
wandering among the lazy, frustrated characters, the scene of the
death of Falstaff and the departure of Pistol, the scene of the
French generals restless on the night before battle, the scene of

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Henry stealing through his camp at night, now talking unrecog-
nized to his soldiers, now pondering soft-voiced upon his duties as
a King. Like Ivan the Terrible, Henry V took the naturalistic
medium of the cinema to its limits, straining nobly to extend its
artistic frontiers.

The Film and Realism

For in the last resort the nature of a photographic art invites
belief in the actuality of what is being recorded. It is therefore
to be expected that the film has developed most consistently
and successfully in the direction known as realism, that is the
reconstruction of life in such a way as to give its environment and
psychology the effect of complete authenticity.

The desire to create the detailed effects of authenticity in the
film has come at a time when both the novel and the drama have
succeeded in achieving the same object more notably than at any
previous stage in their development. On the other hand, the
visual arts of painting and sculpture have in their most experi-
mental forms worked in a direction opposite to the realistic
representation of persons and objects: the photograph took from
them the need to serve the ends of mere representation, which up
to the invention of the camera they alone could satisfy. The
evolution of the comparatively recent art of the novel was an
evolution towards ever-increasing realism in the treatment of
human environment and character; such outstanding writers as
Dickens, Thackeray, Gogol, Turgeniev, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy were succeeded by James, Conrad, Proust, Joyce, dos
Passos, Mauriac and Virginia Woolf, all of whom, with many
others, placed psychological authenticity above all the effects of
the romantic, fantastic or picaresque. A similar central aim can
be seen in the trend of the theatre from the later nineteenth
century to the present time.

Whereas the novelist works normally from within his character's
psychological system (extreme examples being Joyce's Ulysses
and Virginia Woolf 's novels of interior monologue), the film-
maker and the dramatist must normally work only in the con-

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vention of observed action and speech,* which is the boundary
within which we assess each other in actual life. Although the
American cinema has produced some notable fantasies or partial
fantasies (such as All that Money Can Buy), the most distinguished
contribution of such directors as Ford, Dieterle, Capra, Welles,
Wyler and Sturges has been in the direction of authenticity.

Realism should not be thought of as the antithesis of the poetic
treatment of life. It is true that realism can be prosaic, as in the
case of Dreiser's work and some of that by Wells and Galsworthy,
but there is no need for the authentic to be prosaic. Poetry is the
record in art of intense emotional experience. The term
poetic may be used broadly alike of the work of Keats in verse
and the work of Virginia Woolf in prose. There are passages in
Proust which are poetic in the intensity of the emotional experi-
ence recorded, and the balance with which it is presented: this
formal element, this sense of rounded control, must be present for
the poetic experience to be felt. The film is equally capable of
giving this effect. The young worker played by Jean Gabin in
Carne's and Prevert's film Le Jour se Ihve is a character from a
poetic film the main effect of which is psychological authenticity.
Yet upon reflection one sees that the character is more concen-
trated than is possible in real life, more sensitive in his words to
the nature of his emotional experiences, more immediately
responsive to his fellow creatures as indeed they are to him. Le
Jour se leve is therefore a poetic as well as a realistic film, a con-
centration, an intensification of authentic human experience. The
characters are all more alive than fife. This is true also of Ford's
greater films, of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, of David Lean's and
Noel Coward's Brief Encounter. Welles' renowned Citizen Kane
for all its elaborate facade of realism (the 4throw-away' lines and
the naturally-lit sets) was equally a concentration, an emotional
intensification.

In spite of its inveterate fatalism (implicit in all the Carne—
Prevert films released up to the time of writing) Le Jour se leve is
one of the most satisfying of major French films. History may
well place the work of Jean Renoir in France ahead of Carne's
because of its greater subtlety and vitality, but Le Jour se leve

* Even the dream imagery of the avant-garde psychological films is only an advanced
form of observed action, albeit imagined within the psychological system of the
characters concerned.

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belongs more simply and directly to the film's main movement
towards poetic realism. The feelings of the isolated man, a
murderer or perhaps more fairly a homicide, with whose criminal
action the audience is in complete sympathy, are conveyed within
the limited confines for action afforded by a small attic bedroom
filled with the symbols and relics of his emotional life. The room
is violated by the bullets of organized law and finally impregnated
by the creeping clouds of tear-gas which roll uselessly over the
hunted man's dead body after he has finally committed suicide.
Few films in the history of the cinema have managed to convey
human emotion and suffering so powerfully or so sensitively,
almost without words, and aided only by natural sounds and a
low throb of music which are orchestrated together to emphasize
the tension. Le Jour se leve was created in the finest tradition of
screen fiction. The best British contributions to this class of film
have been The Way to the Stars, Brief Encounter and Odd Man
Out, and among the American, Wellman's Ox-bow Incident and
Wilder's Lost Week-end.

It can be argued, however, that the greatest achievements of
the screen so far have been those which belong most naturally to
it as a medium. Of all the artistic media available to mankind the
motion picture camera and microphone are the most natural
means of bringing to an audience the world of non-fictionalized
humanity. The camera invites belief in the actuality of what is
seen to be going on unless it is patently artificial. Coleridge's
'willing suspension of disbelief ' operates to a degree unequalled in
the rest of the arts once the film-maker sets himself out to re-
create a field of reality, a measure of the world's surface selected
and narrowed and emphasized by an artist's desire to portray it
with absolute fidelity. A number of films have endeavoured to do
this: let us instance a few of these without prejudice to a number
of others not mentioned: from Russia, Donskoi's films of Maxim
Gorki, Dovzhenko's Shors and Romm's films on Lenin; from
Germany, Pabst's Kameradschaft; from America, Ford's Grapes
of Wrath, Kline's The Forgotten Village and Wyler's The Best
Years of our Lives; from France, Malraux's Espoir, Renoir's La
Grande Illusion, Vigo's L'Atalante and Clouzot's Le Corbeau; from
Italy, Rossellini's Roma, Citta Aperta and Paisa; from Czecho-
slovakia, Weiss's Stolen Frontiers; from Britain, Pat Jackson's

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Western Approaches, Jennings' The Fires were Started, Lean's
This Happy Breed, Reed's The Way Ahead, Watt's North Sea and
Nine Men and the Army Film Unit's Desert Victory. I cannot
think of any other medium in which these authentic presentations
of human life, feeling and activity could have been conveyed so
richly, vividly or with equal economy of time and effect: few of
these films demand attention lasting longer than a hundred
minutes.

The following descriptions are of sequences from Pabst's
Kameradschaft (1932) and Rossellini's Paisa* (1946) respectively.

From Kameradschaft

A group of French miners is preparing to ascend from the
coalface. There is an explosion, followed by a rolling cloud of dust
which covers them. Sheets of fire burst through a wall. A man is
buried screaming. The flare of lit gas traps the men, and the
camera tracks with them as they run. Shouts of hysterical fright
can be heard as the fire comes down the long corridors of the mine
with their still coal-trucks. Meanwhile above-ground, a girl whose
brother is in the mine is seen on a train just leaving the mining-
town. She sees the crowds running to the pit-head, and tries
desperately to get out of the already moving train. The shouts of
the running people are alternated by tense periods of silence, and
an old man whose grandson went down the mine for the first time
on this disastrous day mutters in apprehension 4Mon petit
Georges'. The running crowds increase, contrasted with little
groups of women and children who stay still at their windows or
on the pavement, watching the agitation of the others. The crowd
is halted by the closed iron gates of the pit: the women press
against the gates, their cries increasing. Meanwhile the slight bent
figure of the old man has joined the crowd at the gates; when they
are opened to let in an ambulance the old grandfather manages to
enter. He goes to a deserted entrance to a shaft. He begins to
climb down the shaft on narrow rungs: the shaft is a noisy, echo-
ing chamber of fire. The scenes alternate between the women
pressing on the gates and a terrified miner buried under the
creaking, straining, bursting pit-props. Meanwhile the old man
descends deeper into the shaft with its queer roaring and moaning
sound like the unending cries of lost and tormented souls.

* Paisa is an idiomatic word meaning just people, ordinary, typical people.

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

From Paisa

The scene is a simple, rather isolated monastery in the north of
Italy. The area has been liberated. The Brothers rejoice and let
out their hidden poultry. They kneel in thanksgiving, the sun
shining down on them and their hens pecking hungrily in the
foreground. Three American Army Captains approach the
monastery. There is great excitement when they arrive. They are
received formally and courteously by the Abbot of the Monastery.
They tell the Reverend Father that they are Chaplains, and they
offer gifts of chocolate to the Brothers, who are touched by this
and very excited and nervous. Everyone is standing, and a little
embarrassed over language and courtesies. The Chaplains under-
stand that the Italians can offer them only cabbages for food: at
this, they unload food in tins from their haversacks before the
delighted and marvelling faces of the Brothers.

Later the Brothers learn that only one of the Chaplains is a
Catholic; the others are a Protestant Priest and a Jewish Rabbi.
There is a terrible, whispered anxiety over this discovery. The
Brothers determine to pray for these two lost souls whom their
sense of courtesy does not allow them to expel. They reluctantly
ask the Catholic Chaplain about the matter: he explains that
these men are his comrades, and it does not occur to him to
question their faith or integrity. The Brothers settle to prayer,
astonished at this answer.

In the Kitchen, with its beautifully patterned tiles, everything
is bustle while the tinned food is being prepared. In the Refectory
the Brothers and their guests assemble: they explain their meal is
eaten in silence except for a prayer and the single voice of a
reader. But food is laid only before the visitors: the Brothers have
decided to fast on this day of rejoicing in hope that this sign of
faith will bring the two lost souls into the Church of Rome. The
whole of this episode is simple, direct and touching, with humour,
emotion and unusual characterization finely balanced in a por-
trait of two nationalities and outlooks, meeting so unexpectedly
for the first time.

No words can hope to represent the complete and immediate
sense of actuality these reconstructions of episodes from real
human experience achieve, whilst at the same time they reveal

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and stress the underlying emotional significance of them. Here is
film art at its best, demonstrating a remarkable attainment in
fifty years of rapidly evolving experiment.

Colour and Stereoscopy

The film now moves on towards more subtle and less obtrusive
colour and to the final establishment of stereoscopic effect. Colour
adds depth and contrast, an increased illusion of perspective to
the film: its non-realistic use of psychological effects has scarcely
yet been developed, except in Disney's animated films which is
not the same thing as, for example, the introduction of colour as a
motif in films of a monochromatic, or almost monochromatic,
kind.* Colour will add greatly to the expressive resources of the
cinema, even though at present it makes the work of the experi-
ment ahst more difficult because of its costliness.

Stereoscopy may at first seem to introduce a complete revolu-
tion in the whole aesthetic of the film. But this is surely not so.
The basis of the art of the film is the physical fact that the film-
maker can put his camera before a selected action, record it as he
wishes and then assemble his results according to whatever order
and pattern suit his imagination. The stereoscopic image does not
alter this physical basis of the film: the film-maker is still master
of the situation. The selected image is still under his control: the
manner of its presentation is still his to contrive. Rather it can be
said that stereoscopy will give him new and astonishing powers,
confirming rather than denying the artistic mastery of the film
over the complex of human activities. In place of the lateral
movements within a single plane which are all that a two-
dimensional image allows, the artist working with the stereoscopic
film will be able to elaborate movements within a three-dimen-
sional space, such as we observe in normal experience with our
binocular vision. Editing will become an exciting process by
means of which the sudden juxtaposition of special relationships

*Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's experiments in mixing monochrome and
colour in A Matter of Life and Death were a beginning for this kind of development in
the film.

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

between the viewer and the action will be felt much more acutely.
The spectator will find himself more closely involved in the action
since it will seem to proceed both behind and before the plane of
the screen itself. It is not yet clear what the economics of stereo-
scopy will be from the experimentalist's point of view, but once
the equipment is installed in the cinemas, it may well be that a
stereoscopic sound-film will not cost a great deal more to produce
than a two-dimensional sound-film. Just as when sound was first
introduced commercially, so there is likely to be a retrograde
period after the arrival of stereoscopy during which both producer
and public slake their curiosity with a new and exciting physical
experience. What matters is that the period should be as short as
possible before the exceptional film-maker uses the advantage of
stereoscopy to carry the true art of the film forward yet another
stage.

Conclusion

This essay has tried to establish the notable expansion of the art
of the film during the first fifty years of its availability to the
artist. That a thousand bad films are made for every one outstand-
ing work of art matters little: the same proportion has been the
rule in every art. No work of art can be exceptional without a
thousand lesser works to make it so by comparison. What matters
is that the medium of the cinema has been invented at a time
when its technical powers are most needed to bridge the gap in
our human communications. Time and space have been narrowed
during this century with a rapidity which has discovered us to be
without any proper perspective of the revolutionary changes in
human relations which these sudden adjustments require. The
old, slow world has gone with its system based largely on isolated
countries, national superstitions, dangerous ignorances and half-
primitive prejudices. For the first time in human history every
living person is virtually within three days' reach of every other,
and vast problems which once remained hidden by sheer distance
are now the commonplaces of our press, radio and cinema.

The film is a medium to help the new world-citizen realize his

EXPERIMENT IN THE FILM

problems and his opportunities, the wealth of new relationships
and activities open to him. Universal ignorance in responsible
people is no longer excusable. The cinema's rapid and spacious
eye can compass this complex world, provided the film-makers
themselves are equal to their great and illuminating task. The
film is at our disposal. Experiment in its use has revealed its
powers and suggested its potentialities. In a period during which
a philosophy of fatalism and defeat has been readily adopted for
far too long by people baffled by the problems of the new, closely-
knit world, the film-makers can adopt a different philosophy.
Their medium inspires a realization of international opportuni-
ties, a combination of the details of human psychology with an
understanding of the range of the world's activities. The willing
audience for the film is already a great part of all humanity, and
increases as the cinema gradually spreads its screens into the
farthest places of the earth. No artist before has had such an
opportunity or such an audience. The quality of his art will be
his answer to this challenge.

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

BY JACQUES B. BRUNIUS

Looking Back

'avant-garde' made its appearance more or less at the same
time all over the world, but perhaps the most definite, systematic
and long-lived movement developed in Paris.

Nothing, at one time, irritated me more than avant-garde
films. Most of the younger and more enterprising minds in the
French cinema were in revolt against what had so quickly be-
come a fashion, a box of tricks, a set of easily copied mannerisms.
For the good period of avant-garde had been soon over, and the
endless abuses, the monotonous harping on what had once been
the freshest and most brilliant ideas, made us forget the magic
of their conception. Satiety spoiled our pleasure when, as we
might have foreseen, innumerable followers vulgarized the
discoveries given us by the all too few inventors. The taunts of
men like Rene Clair, Luis Buiiuel or Robert Desnos were not of
course flung at what was new and original, but at the catchpenny
use that debased it. Tomorrow's vanguard was pitted against
the rearguard of yesterday.

No film is good for the sole reason that it introduces something
new, and if genius is usually accompanied by daring, daring alone
is no guarantee of genius.

One of the discoveries, or rediscoveries, of the post-war
generation had been the absurd. The wonder of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, the fantastic of the Romantics, assumed in

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

the first quarter of our century the colours of the absurd. People
who were easily pleased, particularly with the ideas of others,
indulged in absurdity that was completely gratuitous, refusing
to recognize that even the absurd has its own ineluctable logic
whose laws may not be ignored or broken with impunity. Those
of the rising generation who had felt the influence of Lafcadio's
'gratuitous act',* who had absorbed Rimbaud, Mallarme,
Valery, Gide, Jarry, Apollinaire, Picasso and Dada, now dis-
covered surrealism and psychoanalysis. They learned with Freud
to distinguish the determining factors in the absurd, and above
all a relativity of the absurd, without which the very word is
meaningless. This discovery of the absurd was significant only
if it was extended by other discoveries, its glorification had no
value but to denounce a lap already run by human reason,
beyond which the absurd would be able to take its place in a
broader rationality. In this adventure the duller wits floundered
about in the most exasperating fashion, nowhere more than in
the cinema, where so few brilliant men would risk themselves.

The lapse of time allows us to discriminate better today,
yesterday's passions having cooled to make room for others. Now
we are able to see that even bad avant-garde films did not
entirely deserve the oblivion that has swallowed them up. They
must be mentioned if only because they shared in the tendencies
of the good ones, because in their failure they show us what they
might have been and reveal the quality of the best.

About Words

Whenever the term 'experimental cinema' is used a good deal of
confusion ensues, for its meaning is apt to be over-inflated or
diminished. Many other names have been in circulation, but none
has won the right to endure. We have had 'pure cinema', 'integral
cinema', 'abstract films', but nobody has succeeded in proposing
a definition for any one of these terms that might have imposed
itself and been adopted. To avoid subsequent confusion before
plunging deeper into the subject, it may not be unprofitable to
* Gide — Les Caves du Vatican.

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

try, if not to define them at least to differentiate between them,
and trace approximately how far the meaning of each may be
stretched.

'Experimental cinema', used more especially in England, is
certainly the most comprehensive term. All that is out of the
every-day rut of film production at any given time can be
considered as experimental. The preoccupation with the future,
with research, implied by this expression make it tempting to
use. And yet it seems to me to give rise to serious objections.
As soon as a scientific experiment succeeds, by the mere fact of
attaining its end it ceases to be an experiment and becomes
merely another scientific acquisition, a scientific fact. In the
field that concerns us, a field of art, any attempt crowned with
success not only at once goes beyond experiment to become an
artistic acquisition, but more, it often happens that the success
if complete, perfect, impossible to outstrip or even to equal,
absolutely forbids anyone, even its author, to repeat it. Imitated
or copied it becomes odiously trite. Chaplin's A Woman of Paris
gave birth to the 'Lubitsch style', and no one would dream of
complaining of that. Neither would it be denied that the man
rash enough to repeat the Dance of the Rolls in The Goldrush,
even by replacing the forks by toothpicks and the rolls by
sponge-fingers, would be rated a fool.

Apart from this, it seems to me that the words 'experimental
cinema' lead to unfortunate confusion with what must properly
be qualified as experimental and can be called nothing else. I mean
the many laboratory experiments made by the Russians, above
all in cutting and editing. There was Pudovkin's experiment,
alternating a railway accident, a scene of domestic affection, and
so on, with the same close-up of a face: an experiment by which he
proved that cutting can modify an actor's expression, for the
same impassive face successively appeared to be horrified or
affectionate, according to the preceding or ensuing shot. Here,
properly speaking, is experimental cinema: as soon as this dis-
covery had been put into practice it could no longer count as an
experiment.

In fact, if we admit the validity of this term in the cinema, all
great original works of art and literature, which have always been
at variance with their epoch's prevailing aesthetic, would equally

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

have to be qualified as experimental. Nothing in any case can
induce me to place under so restrictive a heading the two films
that I consider of first importance in this field: "Entr'acte by
Rene Clair and Un Chien Andalou by Buiiuel, both successes,
absolute, isolated and conclusive.

The French term 'avant-garde' which has crept into the English
vocabulary is certainly no better, for with its slightly ridiculous
suggestion of military heroics it can hardly be uttered without
putting one's tongue in one's cheek. It can be said that every
artistic activity has its spearhead, when new means of expression
are being created for original thought or feeling, but their
creator does not plume himself upon what to him is the natural
end of his activity. People who make a parade of avant-garde
had better beware, for we have the right to expect them never to
repeat themselves, never to imitate anybody, and that what they
have to say shall be an absolute revelation every time. Precious
few 'cineastes d'avant-garde', as they used to be called with the
utmost seriousness, have lived up to their pretensions.

The terms 'pure', 'absolute', 'integral' cinema, that almost
caught on in 1925, had the merit of attempting to be less vague,
more limited and less ambitious, but they were none the less
unsuitable, and certainly not attractive to the ear.

The three words have usually been given the same meaning,
and they cannot better be defined than by quoting Henri
Chomette, the author of Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse and Cinq
Minutes de Cinema Pur. He thought it necessary to justify these
two very beautiful films, which incidentally needed no justifica-
tion, in these fines:

'The cinema is not limited to the representative mode. It can
create, and has already created a sort of rhythm (I have not
mentioned it in connection with present-day films, as its value is
greatly attenuated by the meaning of the image seen). Thanks to
this rhythm the cinema can draw fresh strength from itself which,
forgoing the logic of facts and the reality of objects, may beget
a series of unknown visions, inconceivable outside the union of
lens and film. Intrinsic cinema, or if you prefer, pure cinema —
because it is separated from every other element, whether
dramatic or documentary — is what certain works lead us to
anticipate . . .'

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse demonstrated this proposition
by eliminating actor and decor and by leaving to the reflections of
light in rapidly moving crystals the task of creating shifting forms
that owed more to chance than to the hand of cameraman or
director. The latter reserved for himself only the final choice and
the creation of rhythm by montage. Cinq Minutes de Cinema Pur
reverted to the teaching of the first film without adding to it, and
showed that though such an astounding success might at a pinch
be repeated, it would be dangerous to persist in it. Nor did
Chomette persist. This was one of those cases in which, the first
shot having pierced the bull's-eye, the experiment had lost all
value of permanence. His two films remain the only perfect
examples ever given of his definition of a rigorously 'pure' cinema,
as distinct from 'abstract' cinema. Other devices for creating
forms and movements have been used in sequences of other films,
but no director has ever consented to strip himself so bare of all
that recalled the other arts, so entirely to renounce all anecdote,
so utterly to conjure away the object behind its light and move-
ment.

It was above all by having recourse to various distortions of
creatures or objects that people tried later to create visual effects,
and thus they more nearly approached the familiar methods of
the other graphic arts.

Rene Clair from this time on evidently felt the practical
impossibility of sticking closely to the principles set forth by his
brother Henri Chomette. He wrote, in an attempt to broaden the
definition of pure cinema: 'It seems to me that a fragment of film
becomes pure cinema as soon as sensation is caused the spectator
by purely visual means.' This generalization allowed him to set
aside as an exceptional case the abstract film, whose spell was a
serious danger to the 'purists' if they wished to remain too 'pure'.

The expression 'abstract film' appears to have been used for the
first time to describe a film by Fernand Leger and Dudley
Murphy, Le Ballet Mecanique. No designation could be more
inept. This remarkable picture was far less abstract than Leger 's
painting. The human element predominated, either by direct
representation, thanks to the close-ups of faces or fragments of
faces, and the scenes acted, or else by the agency of kitchen
implements gracefully swinging through space: saucepans

1. La Femme Du Nulle Part
(Louis Delluc, France, 1922)

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2. La Fete Espagnol
(Germaine Dulac, France, 1920)

>.<%. -

3. En Rade
(Cavalcanti, France, 1926-7)

4. La Coquille et le Clergyman
(Germaine Dulac, France, 1927)

5. L' Inhumaine
(Marcel L'Herbier, France, 1925)

6. La Roue

(Abel Gance, France, 1920-22)

La Passion de Jeanne D' 'Arc
(Carl Dreyer, France, 1928)

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were stripped of their utilitarian import, certainly, but perfectly-
recognizable and inexorably concrete. Perhaps people meant that
the authors of the film had abstracted themselves from dramatic,
literary, documentary and other conventions. They had not in
any case abstracted themselves from the most openly representa-
tive pictorial influences. However that may be, it is impossible to
be satisfied with so vague an expression, and I propose giving the
term its real meaning by retaining as prototypes of the abstract
film only Diagonal Symphony by Viking Eggeling (1917—22),
Opus by Walter Ruttmann (1923—25) and Fischinger's Lichtertanz
(1922).

This determination of words and phrases has made me postpone
starting the history of my subject at its beginning, and has
brought us prematurely to its very heart. But I hope the
sacrifice of order to a certain punctiliousness of ideas will be
welcomed. It goes without saying that it will not prevent my
using the words criticized above, either for their historic value or
for lack of better ones.

The French Cinema in 1918

Once the first childlike enthusiasm of the early days was for-
gotten, when the discovery of the new toy had swept the pioneers
at one stroke into a world of miracles and poetry, the cinema had
suffered from the perishable character of its celluloid foundation
and from the disdain in which photography was held as being
unworthy of an artist. It needed a good deal of disinterested
courage to leave the imprint of personal genius on what was
doomed to an ephemeral success of only a few months, a solely
popular success moreover, and one that posterity would not even
be able to rescue from oblivion, so soon would the films shrink,
dry up and crumble away.

The men who had had sufficient courage or naivete were already
half-forgotten. No more than a few score of people remembered
that Melies, Edwin Porter, Griffith, had invented, one after
another, fading, dissolving, masking, superimpositions, slow

5 65

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motion, quick motion, parallel action, close-ups and tracking-
shots. From about 1905 the French cinema had made up its mind
to be no more than a second-rate poor man's theatre, photo-
graphed and bereft of speech. What was the use of anything better
when it brought in money as it was? There had been Forfaiture in
1916, it is true, shown in France in 1917. Cecil B. de Mille's film
had made a sensation. It was only later (Intolerance came to Paris
about 1921 and The Birth of a Nation about 1923) that the
influence of Ince and Griffith's previous work could be recognized
in it. There were Sennett and Chaplin too, and all these encour-
aging signs raised the hopes of the more stubborn. But the
cinema's economic sinews, which had always and everywhere
conditioned both its progress and its periods of stagnation, still
seemed inflexible in France.

It was only towards the end of the war that French production
allowed a breath of fresh air to penetrate, most probably for
financial and economic reasons. The French film industry, a
power on the world market, and until the war of 1914 enthroned
as queen on American territory, had been obliged, because of its
enforced idleness, to abdicate. It had to do something to try and
reconquer lost ground, and this time decided to open the door to a
few newcomers, or rather (for we must not exaggerate) cautiously
to set it ajar, and shut it again as quickly as possible.

But let us proceed in an orderly manner: before assuming a
positive guise, avant-garde, that was to play the same part in the
film world as an opposition in the world of politics, took on, like
any opposition, a negative or rather a negating attitude, a
negation that first arose from criticism.

Before the war of 1914 it cannot be said that any real criticism
of the cinema had existed in France. When Guillaume Apollinaire
in his review, Les Soirees de Paris (1913), took the trouble to treat
some forgotten Western seriously, and to discover in it a new form
of poetic feeling, he was merely considered eccentric. There were
only the publicity agents, of whom many, disguised as critics,
remained firmly entrenched in the Press until the following war
of 1939. One of these gentlemen, who wrote for a most important
Parisian daily, perpetrated a long article on the film adapted
from Somerset Maugham, a work written by that well-known and
gifted English author, Mr. Human Bondage.

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The Birth of Criticism

In 1919 Louis Delluc published CinSma et C£e, soon followed by
PhotogSnie, Chariot, Drames de Cintma, which may be considered
as the first books on the aesthetic of the cinema. Ricciotto Canudo
founded the Club des Amis du Septikme Art. From 1920 to 1925,
Delluc, Canudo, Moussinac, Rene Clair, Robert Desnos, Jean
Tedesco, Pierre Henry, Jean Mitry, Emile Vuillermoz, Lucien
Wahl and others drew the attention of the intellectuals to the
cinema's possibilities. But this art — if art it is — had soon
turned its face away from adventure, and of all the roads stretch-
ing before it at its birth had chosen only one — a sorry imitation
of the theatre. The critics in opposition refused to accept this road
as the right one, and awakened memories of the boldness of the
pioneers (Melies, Zecca, Jean Durand, etc.), a boldness that was
often naive and sometimes involuntary, but full of courage all the
same. They drew attention to the good film-making that still went
on in France (some adventure serials, notably by Feuillade) and
emphasized that it was now due chiefly to a few Hollywood direc-
tors, Ince, Griffith, Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Stroheim and others,
that the cinema could still hold out some promise and was still
capable of discovering such authentic film personalities as Charles
Ray and William Hart. The critics also gave a warm welcome to
the young German and Swedish, and later on to the Soviet schools
as they appeared.

The avant-garde among critics denied then the intrinsic merit
of what was done usually, giving importance to what was seldom
or no longer done, and thus they affirmed all that might be
accomplished if those who had chosen the cinema as their career
would but consent to learn its language, acknowledge its magic,
and offer this means of expression to those who had faith in it.

Certitudes and Problems of the Avant-Garde

The earliest films had been documentaries and newsreels, photo-
graphic records of life and nature. The first makers of fiction films
shot in studio sets concentrated on the creation of new miracles,

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hence Melies' invention of nearly all camera-tricks, that had since
been abandoned. In either case the most immediate impulse of
the men possessed of this new instrument had been to record
movement.

These were the principles, elementary, obvious and yet for-
gotten, that avant-garde had to rediscover and defend. But so
much had been discovered since then that there was no question
simply of returning to the first uncertain stumblings.

The psychological magnifying-glass of the close-up allowed the
cinema to entertain rather higher ambitions than a mere stage
performance of The Assassination of the Duke of Guise as for a
provincial tour.

The integration by close-ups of inanimate objects with the
action, the subjective value of tracking- shots and changes of
angle, here were forms of expression that owed nothing to the
theatre, to writing, or to the graphic arts, and were sufficient in
themselves to assure the film's autonomy.

Growing awareness of a new rhythm created from the actor's
gestures and its interference with the cadence of montage,
fostered fresh hopes. But this phenomenon, though perceptible,
had elusive laws, and gave rise to a great deal of discussion.

In any case, said the critical opposition, a whole vocabulary,
scattered and embryonic, exists already, and need only be broken
into syntax and harnessed to daring themes to be able to express
anything under the sun. Thirty years later one is inclined to
wonder whether this was not setting ambition too high, whether
the cinema, after so many failures in its adaptations of famous
works, can really be considered still as a universal means of
expression, and whether it would not be better for it to develop
in the direction of what it best expresses, what it alone can com-
pletely express. But here I am anticipating conclusions, and it
must be admitted that undaunted temerity and inordinate
ambition were needed then to brave the prevailing mediocrity.

Until now avant-garde had been content with seeking what the
cinema — its documentary value already acknowledged — might
contribute to dramatic art.

There came to light another discovery that was to lead to the
notion of a cinema entirely sufficient to itself, free of all anecdote,
and from there to 'pure' and then to 'abstract' cinema. Certain

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newcomers laid emphasis on the extreme potence of cinematic
images considered as poetic material, a quality doubtless inherent
in the atmosphere of a film's projection in a dark theatre filled
with men and women strangers to one another. However that
may be, a quite new and unsuspected force came into being,
owing even less to the poetry of words and images than a film
drama owes to a stage play. A new claim was advanced now for
the right of the film, as of poetry or painting, to break away from
both realism and didacticism, from documentary and fiction, in
order to refuse to tell a story, if and when it pleases, and even to
create forms and movements instead of copying them from nature.
Moreover, when elements of the visible world are used, objects,
landscapes or living creatures, there is still no necessity to im-
prison them in conventions, whether logical, utilitarian, senti-
mental or rational. It was Rene Clair who wrote:

'As for me, I can easily reconcile myself today to admitting
neither rules nor logic into the world of images. The marvellous
barbarity of this art enchants me. Here at last is virgin soil . . .
Dear optical illusion, you are mine. Mine this newborn world
whose pliant features mould themselves to my will.'

A movement of ideas such as this was naturally connected to a
great extent with the modern trends in poetry and painting as
they were at their conception just before the war of 1914, and in
full bloom just after it (cubism, dadaism, surrealism, orphism,
futurism, abstract painting, and so on). The cinema appeared to
people as a new provider of images, images that moved, that were
gifted with a quite special character, and that could group them-
selves in time in accordance with a rhythm that no other medium
could accomplish.

Unfortunately, discussions such as these never fail to open the
floodgates to the worst type of intellectual tarradiddle, unjustifi-
able literary pretensions and a pseudo-philosophical vocabulary.
In due course we learned from Messrs. Jean Epstein, Marcel
L'Herbier, Abel Gance, Dr. Paul Ramain and others, that the
cinema was epiphenomenal, paroxistic, oneiric, animistic, theo-
genistic, psycho-analytical, transcendental and godknowswhat-
else. I fear such a deluge may have drowned many enthusiasms.

Irritating though it was at the time, this agitation has a series
of positive results to its credit: problems were examined that had

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never been considered before, or were now ignored, or had simply
been obscured by routine. Not all these subjects were imperative,
but not all have ceased to be interesting or topical, and some
would be worth rediscussing now and then. There can be no
question here of recording details of the abundant literature
devoted to these problems. One would have to obtain com-
plete collections of the best reviews of the time: Cinta, Cine*
Pour Tous (subsequently merged), and even Cinemagazine which,
though more popular, was still open to new ideas; books by Delluc
and Moussinac, Rene Clair's articles in Le Thiatre et Comcedia
Illustre, Robert Desnos' articles in Le Journal Litteraire, the texts
of lectures given at the Vieux Colombier on 'The Cinema's
Creation of a World' and 'Creation of the Cinema',* the special
numbers on the cinema in Les Cahiers du Mois, and finally the
Revue du Cine'ma which, from 1928 to 1931, formed a kind of
summing up of all the ideas of the foregoing decade. Even though
one succeeded in mustering these records possessed by no
film library, by having recourse to the private collections of the
people concerned, the comparison of all the contradictory themes
would be wearisome and unending, and it is sufficient to choose
some of the most pertinent and characteristic opinions.

Photogenia and Light

'Not enough attention is paid to photogenic objects. A tele-
phone receiver, for instance . . .'

'Light, above everything else, is the question at issue ... a
director must realize that light has meaning.' — (Louis Delluc,
1920).

The Film's Power of Scrutiny

'It really dissects the soul, takes physiognomical samples,
swabs from unalloyed feelings.'— (Jules Supervielle, 1925.)

* Some titles of the lectures given in 1925 deserve mention: Meaning of Cinema, by
Lion Pierre-Quint; Photogenia of the Mechanical World, by Pierre Hamp; Psychological
Value of the Visual Image, by Dr. Allendy; The Formation of Sensibility, by Lionel
Landry; Human Emotion, by Charles Dullin; Humour and the Fantastic, by Pierre Mac
Orlan; The Comic, by Andre Beucler; Time and the Cinema, by Jean Tedesco; Cinematic
Images, by Jean Epstein; The Cinema's Fetters, by Germaine Dulac; Photogenia of
Animals, by Madame Colette; The Cinema in Modern Life, by Andre Maurois. Technical
problems were treated there by Rene" Clair, Abel Gance, Philippe Horiat, L'Herbier,
Cavalcanti, Moussinac.

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Rhythm

'I have also seen an admirable technical phenomenon. I have
seen cadence.' — (Louis Delluc, 1920.)

No sooner was the idea of rhythm in the air than many people
racked their brains to discover a connection between cinemato-
graphic and musical rhythm. Notably Dr Paul R amain, who for
years on end sent in an average of two articles a month to Jean
Tedesco, the editor of Cinia-Cine0 Pour Tous, designed to prove
that the best films were composed like concertos, and supporting
his argument with all the musical terms ad hoc.

Rene Clair, deciding one day in 1925 to shed a little light on the
doctor's ideas, wrote:

'On the screen the sequence of events occurs in time and space.
One must also reckon with space. The sentimental quality of each
event gives its measurable duration a quite relative rhythmic
quality.

'I used to think, before stooping over the luminous table on
which the pictures are assembled, that it would be easy to give
a film regular rhythms. I discerned three factors in the films'
rhythm, thanks to which one might obtain a cadence not un-
connected with that of Latin verse:

1. The length of each shot.

2. The succession of scenes or motives of action (interior
movement.)

3. Movement of objects recorded by the lens (exterior move-
ment: the actors' gestures, the mobility of the scenery,
etc. . . .)

But the connections between these factors are not easy to
establish. The length (1) and the succession (2) of the shots have
their rhythmic value subordinated to the 'exterior movement'
(3) of the film, of which the sentimental quality is inestimable.
And what metrical law can resist the balance between spectator
and landscape, both equally mobile round the pivot formed by
the screen, this incessant passing from the objective to the sub-
jective thanks to which we experience so many miracles?'

He might have spared his pen. For many long years Dr
Ramain, whose interest was not limited to time-lengths, persisted
in recognizing in the black and white of the film the black and

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white pattern of a musical score, not excluding the demi-semi-
quaver rests. In 1927 still, when I was working with Rene Clair
on the cutting of Un Chapeau de Paille <T Italie (The Italian Straw
Hat), every time we were tired of sticking little bits of celluloid
together we allowed ourselves an interlude for amusement while
we read Dr. Paul Ramain's articles to each other.

This excessive concern with rhythm inevitably led to a neglect
of the film's content. The painter Marcel Gromaire wrote:

'What extraordinary beauty lies in this movement, this cadence
of moving plastic! In La Roue, by Abel Gance, in the midst of the
most appalling scenario, there were wheels of a locomotive,
signals, rails, possessing such beauty. There was an astonish-
ing merry-go-round, too, in Epstein's Cceur Fidele?

'But up to now these achievements have merely been tacked
on to a story, and what a story it often is! Presumably a story
must be invented, the cinema is popular and the populace likes a
story. But to imagine that the public likes none but stupid stories
is an odd misconception.'

The Role of the Musical Accompaniment

It was in about 1924 that the blind pianist's unobtrusive vamping
in the cinema of my childhood gave way to a musical score
adapted for each film, played by a symphony orchestra at least,
and conducted by some maestro from a corner, or even an
opera-house. The results have been both for better and for worse
— usually for worse. The ensuing discussions would still be
instructive for those composers, who are nowadays allowed irre-
vocably to engrave upon the sound-track the inopportune ex-
plosions and redundancies with which they persist in burdening
the slightest moment of tension. All we ask of them is to be part
of the atmosphere, but they will insist on telling the story.
It is as though the writers were incapable of moving us with their
dialogue and plot, the directors with their directing, the camera-
men with their lighting, the editors by their sense of dramatic
movement, and above all the players by their acting. Or are they
all conscious of their inability to express themselves to the point

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of begging the musician not only to underline events with his
grossest effects, but worse, to foretell them with his rolls of the
drum?

From 1925, however, at a period when the cinema, silent as it
still was, possessed fewer emotive levers, Frank Martin, in an
article in Cahiers du Mois did not hesitate to insist upon its being
allowed to go its own way according to its own means:

'Music in the cinema has no other object than to occupy the
ears while the whole attention is concentrated on vision, and to
prevent their hearing the exasperating silence made by the noise
of the projector and the movements of the audience. It is impor-
tant, then, that it should not distract the attention by a richness
and novelty that would divert the eye from the spectacle.'

And we must do justice to Dr. Paul Ramain who, momentarily
abandoning his symphonic and contrapuntal speculations, added
these words full of common-sense:

'Music composed to measure and cut to a strict time -limit is
inevitably broken in inspiration and development. If the film is
beautiful the music will be vanquished by the film, and if the
music is sublime the film will be vanquished by the music.'

Emancipation

In order to free the cinema from the theatre's deathly leading-
strings, the first champions of the new aesthetic did not hesitate
to place it under the less cumbrous tutelage of the other arts.

'Cinema is painting in movement', wrote Louis Delluc.

'Cinema is the music of light', said Abel Gance.

'Rather mime than theatre', thought another.

Then came a second offensive to release the cinema from every
allegiance. 'The Cinema versus Art' was the crusade undertaken
by Marcel L'Herbier and backed with brilliant polemic, for he
was far better as a writer than as a director. But neither friend
nor enemy failed to point out that it was difficult to take these
arguments seriously coming from him, some objecting that so
great an artist had no right to talk like that, others saying with
a sneer that his attitude ill-suited such an aesthete.

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The 'pure cinema' trend is clearly the extreme point of this
movement towards freedom, the spearhead of the avant-garde.

When casting a backward glance at that time it is curious to
observe that written theory and controversy seem to have taken
up more space, and to have left more lasting traces than the films
themselves. It must be remembered that nothing much can be
done in France that is not the application of a doctrine, and the
exposition of it nearly always anticipates its being put into prac-
tice. And if by any chance a Frenchman more empiric than dog-
matic can be found, he considers himself obliged to pay his
contemporaries at least the compliment of justifying himself in
their eyes after the event. This indeed is one of the reasons that
the epithet 'experimental' is so unsuitable to French avant-garde.
Moreover, it must not be forgotten that though the film industry
had taken a few original creators to its heart, it had shut out
ten times as many, and these were reduced to committing theories
to paper that they could not demonstrate on a screen. As for
the happy chosen few, faced with the strong resistance by the
cinema still encountered among successful artists and the
intelligentsia, and on the other hand, a barrier of non-compre-
hension raised by the uneducated public, no eloquence of theirs
could be too great to expound the merits of what they were
trying to do.

The Cinema's Influence

There came a sign, however, that the cinema had won its place
in the sun of Parnassus, theoretically at least, when in 1925
the question of its influence on other arts was mooted. This
we can rapidly pass over, the replies being so muddled that they
are not worth the trouble of analysing. Jean Paulhan settled the
question on the spot with this incisive phrase: 'The arts help
each other far less by what they give than by what they take.'

And Robert Desnos, who could not have cared less about it,
replied to an enquirer: 'We can talk about the influence of the
cinema on morals if you like: it exists. Modern love flows straight
from the cinema, and by that I do not mean only from the

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spectacle on the screen, but from the auditorium itself, from its
artificial night.'

Later on Jean-George Auriol and I returned the echo of his
words to Desnos, when we ran a column in the Revue du Cinema
headed 'The Cinema and Morals'. For a joke I devoted one of these
articles to the cinema's influence on 'artistic' picture-postcards,
which by the by was considerable. But in breaking away, in 1928,
from the discussions about form, we were adopting a new critical
attitude emphasizing the poetic, moral and social import of films,
a formula whose only exponents so far had been Desnos from the
surrealist, and Moussinac from the communist standpoints. It
will be seen farther on, in dealing with the films in question, that
this change of attitude precisely corresponds with what I call the
fourth period, which is also the dissolution, of avant-garde.

It was indeed high time for the French cinema to emerge from
this period of unbridled intellectualism. Surfeited, the young
generation of the time turned, as to a Messiah, towards the
American cinema where Griffith and Mack Sennett and many
others had invented just as much, and perhaps far more, with
less self-consciousness and above all less verbosity.

The Clubs

It would be unfair not to mention the clubs here, so different
from the cine-clubs and film societies of today. The Club des Amis
du Septieme Art, the Cine- Club de France, and then later the
Tribune Libre du Cinema, helped to diffuse new ideas to a wider
public, and illustrated them with their film showings. The per-
formances were often riotous, as the following incident shows:

Potemkin was given at the Cine Club de France (in 1925 or
1926). As soon as the sailors threw the officers, who had tried
to make them eat putrefying meat, into the sea, applause
broke out. The lights went up and the culprits were denounced by
their neighbours: they were members of the surrealist group, and
were forthwith turned out by the police. Nobody dared openly
complain of their having applauded a passage for any but
aesthetic reasons, but great indignation was felt at their having
allegedly gate-crashed.

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One of Stroheim's first films, Blind Husbands, was shown in
1926 at the Tribune Libre du Cin6ma, and a discussion followed.
Edmond Greville expressed admiration at Stroheim's ending
his film with the death of the hero, a Prussian officer, the only
fate he deserved. A man rose declaring that he was an officer in
the French army and that Greville had insulted the army. Other
gentlemen revealed themselves as officers no less determined to
defend the honour of the Prussian army, and they surrounded the
'insulter'. A brawl ensued, and on going to the rescue of Greville
I was felled by a blow on the head from a gallant French captain
who assailed me from behind with a walking-stick.

Specialized cinemas appeared at about the same time as the
clubs. The Cine- Opera first gave Caligari before a Parisian public,
and in about 1924 Jean Tedesco, the editor of Cinea-Cine, proved
with the success of his Theatre du Vieux Colombier that a large
enough repertory of out-of-the-way films already existed to
provide regular shows in a commercial cinema, and could com-
mand a public quite ready to appreciate them.

While the specialized cinemas multiplied (Ursulines, Studio 28,
Agriculteurs), clubs became a money-making proposition, sprang
up like mushrooms, and degenerated without more ado.

After 1928 their progressive influence may be considered at an
end. The films they showed were often less challenging and of
poorer quality than those in the specialized cinemas. As their
reward for having held open debates after the projection, they
were invaded by a horde of intellectual misfits and mothers' boys
desirous of a career in the cinema. The level of the discussions was
enough to make the average spectator blush, and finally most of
the audience no longer came to see a film but to discharge the load
of folly that lay heavy on their stomachs.

And yet, in the midst of all this confusion, a climate favourable
to the production of exceptional films was created. Snobs and
windbags made a public large enough to induce a few patrons of
the arts to back non-commercial films, and even some of the
younger and more enterprising producers allowed a breath of
this new spirit to creep into commercial productions.

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Trends

When the French avant-garde movement is considered from some
distance in time, several distinct currents in the midst of a
complex play of influences can be observed. Romantic and
expressionist German films (chiefly Nosferatu, Caligari and
Destiny) inspired rather deplorable experiments with composition
which unfortunately came nearer to decadent, second-rate stuff
like Genuine, Raskolnikov or Warning Shadows than to the
originals. Moreover, the lesson they held of fantastic romanticism
was not remembered. American so-called comics, which ought
rather to be qualified as poetic or lyric (Mack Sennett, Chaplin,
Hal Roach, Al St. John, Larry Semon, Buster Keaton, Harry
Langdon), prompted a reconsideration of logic and reason and
were an opportune reminder that at the beginning of the century
French slapstick with Onesyme and Polycarpe had known a rather
brilliant period, of which films with Max Linder and Riga din were
the degenerescence, and American comics the heirs. Swedish films
(Sjostrom's The Stroke of Midnight) set a fashion for dreams and
superimpositions. Soviet films (Potemkin) added fresh fuel to the
preoccupation with cutting and editing. Their revolutionary
significance strongly affected the intelligentsia but found no more
echo in out-of-the-way films than in ordinary capitalist produc-
tion.

It goes without saying that direct influence and coincidence are
both mingled in this interplay. To resolve how great a part was
played by each would necessitate a scrutiny of every film, almost
scene by scene and shot by shot — a task I shall leave to some
patient historian to come. But the enumeration of these categories
admits the distinction between two trends: the one towards the
renewal and broadening of subject-matter; the other towards a
more thorough examination of the resources of language and
technique, a photographic quest for new forms and an awakened
consciousness of rhythm. This distinction is not without impor-
tance, as the predominance of the second trend followed by
the final divorce between the two, at first intermingled and
indistinguishable, inexorably forbodes the death of avant-garde.

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The First Avant-Garde : Delluc

The first avant-garde is represented by one man alone: Louis
Delluc.

To the reader of today his writings look like a compendium of
self-evident truths, with a few hasty and imprudent assertions
among them. But no one before him had laid down these prin-
ciples, and oddly enough, though the French had unwittingly
discovered them when the cinema was invented, they were
allowed to sink into oblivion before being recognized for what
they were. Someone had to express them in an elegant and
occasionally elliptical form before they could make much im-
pression on that elite composed of artists, fashionable society and
students, without whom, whether it is a matter for congratulation
or no, the cinema could never have obtained its brevet of nobility.
Delluc's role as a theorist is therefore immense.

He was also the inventor of a way of writing film scripts that
had the double advantage of a certain literary seductiveness and
of creating a remarkably simple cinematic style: a simplicity
all the more precious in contrast with the mannerisms that
succeeded it.

These are the opening fines of his scenario Fttvre (1922):

1 . A bar with sailors . . .

2. A dark ancient street . . .

3. In the old port of . . .

4. Marseilles.

No one has ever been able to give a precise, metrical and
universal definition to these terms: long shots, medium shots,
mid-close shots, close-ups, etc. . . . Unburdened by the vague
and pompous jargon thanks to which film people hoped to rival
in mysteriousness those other esoteric sects, pharmacists, bailiffs
and sports-columnists, Delluc in a few words had been able to
make perfectly clear what was to appear on the screen. There was
no doubt something of a writer's affectation in this, and such
a system would not fit every case. But this conception of a
film had the enormous advantage of introducing a sense of
continuity that had been lacking in the French cinema.

As a director Delluc scrupulously respected this lineal sim-
plicity, and contented himself with enriching his shots with great

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accuracy of observation and detail, and a very personal taste in
lighting and atmosphere.

He wrote the scripts of La Fete Espagnole, made in 1920 by
Germaine Dulac, and of Le Train sans Yeux made in 1925 by
Cavalcanti.

After several that are now forgotten (Fumee Noire, Le
Silence, Le Tonnerre, Le Chemin d'Ernoa), he directed three most
moving films: Fievre (1922), La Femme de Nulle Part (1922),
L'lnondation (1924). The very simple dramatic plots were chosen
above all for their visual values, but interest in the anecdote was
never allowed to flag however sparse it might be.
He died too early, in 1924.

Second Phase : Dulac, Gance, Epstein, L'Herbier

What I shall call the second avant-garde* had as its principal
figures directors who, with the exception of Epstein, had made
their first films earlier or at the same time as Delluc, though these
cannot really be considered as distinct from the general run of
commercial production. While Delluc was alive they briefly felt
his influence, and then each went on to develop his own personal
manner; but all followed a fashion that justifies their being classed
together.

Dulac. After a rather dull start, Germaine Dulac had made a
brilliant flash in the pan under the wing of Delluc when she
directed his script, La Fete Espagnole (1920). This style she
abandoned in her ensuing films, and turned towards the new
trend, that of Gance, Epstein, and L'Herbier, which can be defined
pretty well like this: any anecdote from a novel, however vulgar,
may be accepted or chosen as long as it is disguised by an
exuberant ornamentation of technical effects to 'look visual'. A
further outstanding characteristic of this school: total lack of
humour.
Gance. Abel Gance, exponent of the 'paroxistic' cinema, in his

* I am aware that this division of the avant-garde into its various phases is not the
usual one. But film history is still so vague that I do not despair of seeing my own
classification adopted.

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quest for moments of tension, achieved nothing but grandilo-
quence and sentimental hypertrophy. His Dixieme Symphonie
was a melodramatic story of a cuckold musician conceived in the
style of The Mother's Ordeal. His J' accuse (1919) was an intoler-
ably bombastic war film distinguished chiefly for the cliche of
making dead soldiers rise in superimposition from the battle-field
and pull tragic faces at the camera. La Roue (1920—22), made in
collaboration with the writer Blaise Cendrars, promised better.
Unfortunately, between two admirable 'visual' montage sequen-
ces of engine-wheels and vanishing rails, one had to stomach a
debauch of oozing sensibility about the blind engine-driver who
fumbled with obscene emotion and a lecherous hand at the steel
of his boiler. Gance had a soul so vast that, not satisfied with
exploiting the subjective potentialities of the screen by identify-
ing the lens and the spectator with its personages, he identified
himself with unexpected things, in the most uncalled for way, for
the sole pleasure of experimenting with technical paraphernalia
that was of no use to anyone. When with enormous difficulty and
expense he had placed a camera inside a football he was able to

writer

'the camera becomes a snowball'

(script of Napoleon— 1925—27 — scene
with young Bonaparte at the Ecole de Brienne.)

I can guarantee this quotation as genuine, for I learnt it by
heart at the time with no difficulty at all.

Gance undoubtedly had a sense of the cinema, a sense of move-
ment, at least. It is a pity he never had sense enough to know
what was worth filming. 'Gance, or the solemn grave -digger', as
the young critic Andre Delons called him.

Epstein. Jean Epstein's films were the exact opposite of those by
Gance: dry, intelligent, and totally lacking in sensuality. When
later on his emotions were stirred, it was by the purulent whitlow
of a handsome young fisherman in one of his documentaries on
Brittany, Finis Terrae (1929). On the whole it was not a pretty
scene . . .

And yet Epstein's aridity was expressed by more or less the
same means as was the gushing heart of Gance.

'The conventionalism of the "pompier" style appears as soon
as invention ceases, as much in cubism as in too quick cutting, or

8. Ballet Mecanique

(Fernand Leger, France, 1924-5)

10. Finis Terrae

(Jean Epstein, France, 1929)

9. La Fille de UEau

(Jean Renoir, France, 1925)

11. U Affaire est dans le Sac

(Jacques and Pierre Prevert, France, 1932)

Jacques Brunius as L'Homme au Beret Francais

uyj«

12. Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, France, 1915)

13-16. Entr'acte 17-20. Un Chien Andalou

(Rene Clair, France, 1924) (Luis Bunuel, France, 1928)

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in the sort of cinematic subjectivism which, by dint of too
many superimpositions, becomes ridiculous.' — (Le Regard du
Verre — Cahiers du Mois, October 1925.)

It is a curious paradox that this critic of Jean Epstein's films
should be Jean Epstein himself. But most probably he was
thinking of L'Herbier, Gance and Dulac.

He had not invented quick cutting: some shots in Intolerance
(1915) had only five frames, and it had been used in Hollywood
since then. A very effective example of it could be seen in a
carriage accident in Charles Ray's film Premier Amour (The Girl I
Loved, by Joseph de Grasse — 1923). But Epstein had brought off
some extremely successful rapid cutting with rotating shots in
the scene of the merry-go-round in Coeur Fidele (1923) and he
never got over it. Coeur Fidele was a striking film in spite of a
rather exiguous script. A good deal might have been expected of
its author, and more still after his next film La Belle Nivernaise
(1923), but he soon became a complacent addict to virtuosity for
virtuosity's sake, applying indifferently the same mechanical
tricks to utterly different situations. In Le Lion des Mogols (1924)
he took a drunken scene as an excuse to make the decor go round
and round, clumsily copying the excellent mad scene in Kean,
ou dSsordre et genie (1924), a film by Volkov, and the resem-
blance between the two was further emphasized by his use
of the same leading actor, Mosjoukine. 'Pompier style appears as
soon as invention ceases . . .' L'Affiche (1925) was even poorer.

All this time Esptein afforded the sad spectacle of a wasted
talent, for he really had talent, though for long it was hidden. A
lengthy period of vain efforts to become a commercial director
succeeded his early acrobatics, with as sole result films like Robert
Macaire or Mauprat (1926) which were far more dreary and
mediocre than anything made by 'box-office' directors like
Baroncelli or Hervil, who at least made no claims to being
'artistic'. Above all, Epstein seems to have been the victim of his
extraordinary lack of discrimination in the choice of actors, for
whose inadequacy no juggling with the camera could ever com-
pensate. The juvenile leads he tried to launch in Mauprat and Six
et demie Onze had but one advantage over Tino Rossi: they were
silent and they foundered with their protector. But when finally

6 81

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Jean Epstein found his bent in documentary — Mot Vran (1930),
for instance — his qualities could be seen at last.
UHerbier. So much cannot be said for Marcel L'Herbier. All his
qualities had been squandered on one beautiful, simple film:
UHomme du Large in 1920. Then, having run out of dust for
throwing in the eyes of his avant-garde public, he plunged head-
long into respectability's most empty conventions, aptly sym-
bolized by the dapper little beard of his favourite actor, M. Victor
Francen, whose aggressive silliness and suburban distinction were
supposed to stand for every noble and heroic virtue.

But we are concerned with the sowing of Marcel L'Herbier's
wild oats, and cannot ignore the film that he and his admirers
seem to admire most: Ulnhumaine (1925).

Ulnhumaine, entrusted with the incarnation of inaccessible
love, was a doddering old lady, clothed in complicated rags, each
shot modestly veiled with thick gauze, that accentuated her
appearance of being a badly-preserved ghost in a dilapidated
sepulchre. (At that time the French cinema still laboured under
the delusion that on the screen, as on the stage, actresses were
ageless.) This apparition manifested itself only in hieratic
attitudes, posturing at the head of a staircase made of solid card-
board, over which towered a hearse-like bed. A jeune premier,
daintily flustered, a little wrinkled too, but in rather better repair,
had been given the crushing task of stirring these ancient embers.
Flabby in face and bearing, no effort had been spared to give him
an appearance of vigour with an angular make-up in which the
marks of the palette-knife were clearly visible. The incredible and
prodigiously boring adventures of this Baucis and Adonis were
enacted against sets by Mallet-Stevens, 'modern' to be sure, but
already tottering more unsteadily than any ruin. In the midst of
all this a laboratory scene suddenly burst into view (no spectator
ever recognized it as a laboratory before reading of it in the
papers). It was a would-be cubist set by Fernand Leger, though
why it tried to be cubist is impossible to say, and it merely
succeeded in looking incongruous. Marcel L'Herbier, that dis-
tinguished Master of Ceremonies, was nevertheless the author of
an excellent film in 1925: Feu Mathias Pascal, after Pirandello.
Unkind tongues said that its merits derived chiefly from the
actor Mosjoukine and a young art-director whose name was

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beginning to appear side by side with Mallet- Stevens: Alberto
Cavalcanti. And M. L'Herbier's subsequent production seems to
prove them right.

Technique and Style

Though the second avant-garde is not much to my taste, I think
I have given it credit objectively enough for all that was worth
while in it. The balance-sheet of this school is less impressive than
legend allows. And though incense-bearers have left a copious and
misleading literature, adverse criticism was not lacking from
people who could hardly be suspected of retrograde opinions on
art. 'You do not make avant-garde films simply by introducing
cubist or other decors . . .'as Blaise Cendrars pointed out. And
Rene Crevel: 'Nothing is more lamentable than the systematic
distortion from which many people, blinded by the success of
Caligari, seem to want to make a cinematographic style ... as
though crooked walls could more clearly reveal the soul's dis-
order. Caligari, on the contrary was a perfect work — providing
one arrived in the middle of the film to avoid a preface of such
reasonable foolishness.'

Those who had tried to do something new in those days — in
principle a laudable effort — put the cart before the horse. Their
confidence in technique was unlimited. Now the technique in
French studios, the purely material technique of sets, make-up,
lighting, the quality of photographic emulsion, was still very
poor, and ten years behind Hollywood. The best technicians
worked in commercial films. The modernists tried to have style
without either grammar or syntax, they would try to conjugate
and decline before learning a vocabulary or spelling: feats that
none but an exceptionally talented genius might accidentally
bring off, and such was not their case. These were regrettable
attributes in a school that clung to technique for technique's
sake.

Mallet- Stevens' sets may be considered as one of the festering
sores on the French cinema of the 'twenties. This architect, one of
the least gifted in a century of shoddy builders, bequeathed to

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

Paris an entire street of so-called modern buildings. The inclemen-
cies of one or two winters were sufficient to give the outer walls
the appearance of slums. Happily it is a small private street, much
secluded, where after all no one is forced to pass, and the people
who rashly had it built are probably rich enough not to be obliged
to live in it. But on the screen Mallet-Stevens' misdeeds were
public and innumerable. For several years no 'highbrow' film
could be made without being ruined by his gigantic halls and
drawing-rooms, at once naked and fussy, utterly disproportionate
to the outer shell of the house, and moreover in a style that
clashed with the facade. It is hardly surprising that the actors,
transplanted into surroundings so obviously uninhabitable and of
such doubtful stability, should have been visibly ill at ease. It was
chiefly L'Herbier's films that were affected, but as this style
founded a school (as could be seen at the Exhibition of Decorative
Arts in Paris in 1925), almost all films with avant-garde leanings,
and others too, looked as though they were set in enormous, badly
erected tents, in front of walls of no thickness on which the paper
was blistered, and in the midst of furniture that was out of
fashion before it had ever been in.

The French cinema, invaded by the Comedie Francaise where it
was the tradition to wait until one was fifty before playing an
adolescent, was almost entirely lacking in actors. One of the most
urgent tasks for whoever wanted to undertake its rejuvenation
was to find some and to form them. The greatest weakness of the
avant-garde lay in its failure to assemble a repertory of new
figures for the cinema.

Now for the technical contrivances that they attempted to put
into circulation as having the value of a symbol:

Quick cutting they diverted from its essential purpose, giving
it any and every meaning and abusing and accelerating it until it
was painful to watch.

Superimpositions they wasted in the same way. In Le Diable
dans la Ville (1926) Germaine Dulac doubled the image to indicate
violent emotion in one of her characters. I do not know whether
my eyeballs are peculiarly stable and unemotional, or simply
whether I have never been sufficiently moved, but no such
affective diplopia ever afflicted me, and a vision of this sort on the
screen conveys nothing at all to me.

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Crick-necked camera is another invention of this school, and
one that has since enjoyed undeserved popularity. This is the
name I give to the mania for photographing everything crooked,
when nothing in the actors' field of vision justifies a camera
on the slant. In Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne a" Arc this disease
succeeded in making the topography of the scenes and the
respective positions of the actors absolutely indecipherable.
Before Dreyer, Gance had been a chronic offender, and had given
this habit to his cameramen. I have seen one of them arrange his
tripod crookedly as a matter of course, before even knowing
what scene was to be shot.

Photographic distortions too were in high favour. They can be
seen in Epstein's La Goutte de Sang (1924) and in many other
films. Germaine Dulac was particularly fond of this trick and
sometimes used it to effect as in the drunken scene in Gossette*
(1924). But here too the worst incoherence was not slow to reign.
It was soon impossible for one actor to look at another with any-
thing at the back of his mind without seeing his face transformed
into a crescent moon.

As for the use of soft focus and gauze, the less said the better.
Everyone took to vying with Turner and Claude Monet without
rhyme or reason. These effects soon became as irritating as the
inevitable orange-tinted and purple-toned sunsets in mass-pro-
duced films.

Fortunately at this time the trucks in French studios all had
square wheels, and the impossibility of using them spared us for
another few years the annoyance of irrelevant tracking- shots.

Deviations such as these for long cast discredit upon the
original work of those who were to follow: Rene Clair, Renoir,
Cavalcanti. I have not included Feyder in the second avant-garde,
though for a short time he turned in its direction. But his efforts
to swim with the current, as in Crainquebille (1922) for instance,
appeared heavy and laborious. After a further attempt in
V Image (1924) he realized that his talent lay elsewhere.

Gosse— Kid, urchin, ergo Gossette= kidlet or urchinette.

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

Third Phase

It is fascinating to scalp a doll to see how the eyelids really work,
but it hardly counts as playing at parents and children, and this is
more or less what the directors of the second avant-garde claimed
to be doing. The smallest pretext was good enough to unscrew
the lens and put a cut-glass bottle-stopper in its place, or to
turn the film upside down, and other juggler's tricks. Their little
games would have been far more enjoyable if they had not
thought themselves obliged to pass them off as serious psychology,
the simpler and more honest attitude that newcomers were
going to take.

The year 1923 that saw the first films by Rene Clair and Man
Ray seems to me to mark the beginning of a third period, which
chronologically overlaps the foregoing one.

Rene Clair's Paris qui Dort was a commercial production.

Man Ray's Le Retour a la Raison, first shown at a Dada demon-
stration, 'The Evening of the Bearded Heart', was the first film in
France made outside normal financial channels, with no lucrative
end in view.

From this moment the effort to leave the beaten path went on
at two levels.

Some, like Rene Clair, Renoir, Cavalcanti, alternated avant-
garde shorts with commercial films in which they tried to embody
the same themes in a form more easily acceptable to the public.

Others, like Man Ray, Fernand Leger or Marcel Duchamp,
asked for no more than an audience of connoisseurs at private
shows. They made films in limited editions for bibliophiles, but
thanks to the cine-clubs and the critics their influence widely
overflowed these narrow limits.

Even though, from motives of snobbery, a larger public sharp-
ened its wits to the point of filling the small specialized cinemas to
bursting-point to see these scandalous spectacles, the privately-
sponsored short films formed, properly speaking, the avant-
garde cinema. They made no concession to the taste of the
producers, the distributors or the public. I do not think one of
them repayed its backer, but if the subsequent profits of the cine-
clubs had been collected it is almost certain that some would
largely have redeemed the capital sunk in them. In this category

86'

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the following films, characteristic of the genre, must be classed
together:

Le Retour a la Raison, by Man Ray (1923)

Entr'acte, by Rene Clair, script by Francis Picabia (1924)

Anemic Cinema, by Marcel Duchamp (1925), with Man Ray and

Marc Allegret.

PhotogGnie, by Jean Epstein (1925)

Le Ballet MScanique, by Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy

(1924-25)

Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse, by Henri Chomette (1925)

Emak Bakia, by Man Ray (1926)

Cinq Minutes de Cinema Pur, by Henri Chomette (1926)

Charleston, by Jean Renoir (1926)

Fait-Divers, by Claude Autant-Lara (1927)

La Coquille et le Clergyman, by Germaine Dulac, from a script by

Antonin Artaud (1927)

Elle est Bicimidine, by J. B. Brunius and Edmond T. GreVille

(1927)

UEtoile de Mer, by Man Ray, from a script by Robert Desnos

(1928)

La PHite Lili, by Alberto Cavalcanti (1928)

Roughly two trends can be discerned.

The first aimed at representing aspects of the outer world and
seemingly everyday actions in a poetic context by releasing them
from all rational logic. Man Ray had shown the way by ironically
calling his first irrational film Le Retour a la Raison (The Return
to Reason). Rene Clair in Entr'acte, Renoir in Charleston, Caval-
canti in La Petite Lili, were openly inspired by American comics.

The other school sought to create new forms by photographing
creatures and objects in an unexpected way, by distorting them,
placing them under new lighting, or sometimes by creating
abstract forms. Strictly speaking, none but Duchamp and Cho-
mette come under this category.

In most of the films, in fact, these two trends are constantly
mingled. Preoccupation with rhythm and movement recurs in
the whole series. Nearly all make great play with slow and quick
motion and with all the trick-work then in use: prisms, the dis-
torting lens, masks, multiple superimposition, various soft-focus

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

with coarse or fine gauze, oiled or wet glass plates, and so on. In
La Petite Lili the use of cloth with a very coarse weave gave the
photography the texture of a painting on canvas. Even make-up
was used by Man Ray, who showed a close-up of a woman's face
with open, staring eyes: when she really opened her eyes one saw
that the first ones had been painted on her lids. In the Ballet
Micanique Leger and Murphy discovered an extraordinary
quality of jest and uneasiness in a scene repeated several times
running: a fat woman going upstairs and suddenly finding
herself at the bottom again as in a dream. Sometimes shots were
used in the negative to increase their strangeness, or simply
because when being edited the picture seemed more beautiful in
the negative than the positive. The greatest liberty held sway
over this epoch, resulting in a very complete examination of all
the possibilities afforded by light and movement which can give
the image on the screen the value of a poetic image.

During the whole of this period Clair and Renoir, with dreams
or fantastic tales as their different pretexts, enriched their com-
mercial films with similar inventions.

This time a new spirit crept into the cinema, and this time it
was to stay. Even if one does not like all the films by Rene Clair
and Jean Renoir, it is clear that their style of today is the out-
come, or as it were the resultant, of their research of yesterday.
Unlike their predecessors, they have not been obliged to deny it
or abandon it as an aberration of their youth. Their avant-garde
has served them because when it came to technique they knew
how to distinguish what might be gratuitous for mere beauty
or pleasure in gratuitousness from what must be placed at the
service of a subject.

Rene Clair

The world fame enjoyed by Rene Clair since his success with Sous
les Toits de Paris (1929) does not exempt us from recalling his
earlier, less-known films, or even the first steps of his career.

When he was first seen in one of Louis Feuillade's films (some
serial or other — I cannot remember whether it was UOrpheline or

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Parisette) everyone agreed that he was a pretty bad jeune premier
in a pretty had film. Rene Clair himself had no illusions about it.
It was in 1921, he was about twenty and all he wanted was to
learn the job. Feuillade was still capable, even in a botched and
scamped serial, of slipping in some good cinema. Rene Clair
always maintained that Feuillade's La Perruque, a little film
about chasing after a wig, had taught him more about the cinema
than many a pretentious work. And after a short term as assistant
director with Baroncelli, Rene Clair made Paris qui Dort in
1922—23 from his own script.

Paris qui Dort is still probably his best scenario: a scientist with
the aid of a stupendous machine with magic rays suddenly puts
all Paris to sleep, each citizen frozen into the gesture he was
making. And into this city transformed into a wax museum come
some wide-awake travellers . . . The interplay of stillness and
movement forms a sort of analysis and synthesis, a sort of
demonstration by the absurd of what the cinema consists of, a
counterpart of Buster Keaton's prodigious Sherlock Junior.

Entr'acte (May— June 1924) is impossible to describe: it must be
seen. It was made from a script by Francis Picabia to be put on
with the Swedish ballets, in the ballet Relache, and it is the first
film to be made outside the film industry and yet with sufficient
financial backing. Humour and poetry mingle in it to a frenzied
rhythm and the same drollery as in Mack Sennett's films, by which
Clair was frankly influenced, though he uses even more liberty
with regard to logic. Entr'acte has been the model of many films of
the same sort, but its uniform success was equalled only in a few
brief fragments. In fact Rene Clair no more pinned his hopes on
achievements like this than he did on the attempts at making
'pure cinema'. In 1925 he wrote:

'The existence of "pure cinema" comparable to "pure" music
seems to depend too much today upon accident to deserve to be
taken seriously ... A film does not exist on paper. The most
detailed script could never anticipate every detail in the film's
execution (precise angle of the photographs, lighting, lens-aper-
ture, play of the actors, etc. . . .). A film exists only on the
screen. And between the brain that conceives and the screen that
reflects, lies a great industrial organization with its need for money.

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'It appears vain, then, to foresee the existence of a "pure
cinema" as long as the cinema's material conditions are not
modified and as long as public opinion has not progressed.

'And yet, "pure cinema" is already at the gate ... it looks as
though a fragment of a film could become "pure cinema" as soon
as the spectator's feelings are touched by purely visual means . . .
This is why the chief task of today's "creator" lies in introducing,
by a sort of ruse, the greatest possible number of purely visual
themes in a scenario made to satisfy everyone. Therefore the
literary value of a script is absolutely negligible.'

Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge (1924) is the forebear of a series
of films adapted from Topper and The Invisible Man, In those
days Rene Clair had not the technique of Dunning which gives
such versatility to appearances and disappearances. Armed only
with superimposition, he admirably managed to exploit similar
situations. For once superimposition was really necessary and had
real meaning.

Le Voyage Imaginaire (1925) was made like an American slap-
stick comedy: it had no plot, but a succession of gags skilfully
linked by a sort of fairy pantomime justified by a dream. A dream
atmosphere that would have given true depth to the film was
lacking, but comic and grotesque effects made every moment
sparkle. One of the best remembered was the motor hansom-cab.

La Proie du Vent (1926) is just a good commercial film intended
to reconcile Rene Clair with the captains of the film industry. His
later productions, after Le Chapeau de Paille d'ltalie (1927) and
Les Deux Timides (1928), are well known.

Rene Clair was the first man, with Paris qui Dort, to assemble
a troupe of film actors — Albert Prejean, Jim Gerald, Pre fils,
Stacquet, Ollivier, etc., who are always to be found in his films.

Films Without Sub-titles

Between 1924 and 1928 the subtitle controversy raged. For a long
time enthusiasts had been alarmed by the increasing number of
titles in current production. Distributors added them to French
versions of American films that had not contained many in the

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first place, and even French films were not spared, despite the
protests of their authors. It had reached the point when a reaction
was essential. Lupu Pick and Karl Mayer having set the example
in Germany with Sylvester (1924), a film without a single subtitle,
and the movement took on this extreme form in France as well.
Warnings were heard at once, like that of Lionel Landry:

'The suppression of subtitles cannot be thought of for the
moment. In the invalid's present condition it would be, like many
symptomatic treatments, dangerous therapy. For if anything can
be worse than to project a text it is to create in the minds of most
of the audience the feeling that the situation is not clear, and that
something is lacking: a few words of explanation. Sub-titles can
only be eliminated progressively, and until then tolerated as a
lesser evil; moreover, it is not impossible (Louis Delluc had some
interesting ideas about this) to turn them to account as a rest, a
foil, in the way that architects use neutral material.

'The idea of artistically harmonizing the subtitle with the
picture is childish. You don't look at a subtitle, you read it.'

It made no difference. An active minority wanted this last
semblance of literary bondage to be removed. The operation
could not be performed without injury, and only at the price
of drastically simplifying the script could it be performed
at all. What is more, the film director, while naively thinking
himself emancipated, gave himself a new tyrant: mime. For
some time acting had been growing more sober, but now it began
to effervesce again as in the early days. After all, as Rene Clair
pointed out, if the cinema is to say everything by the sole means
of a visual image it cannot be but at the cost of lightness of touch,
and shots of a calendar slowly turning its leaves are certainly no
better than three months later. We should have to put up
with reducing subtitles to a minimum, concluded Clair, who
practised what he preached.

Leon Pierre-Quint observed: 'Some film directors, having
wanted to set films free from all literature and totally suppress
the printed word, have been obliged to fall back upon symbolic
images more conventional than the screening of sentences.'

Marcel Silver's film UHorloge was a typical case of the epidemic
of symbolic clocks and calendars that swept the cinema.

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Menilmontant (1924) by Kirsanov, though it could not escape
from the necessity of making do with a dull, simplified plot, was
at least saved by an admirable actress, Nadia Sibirskaia.

There was a counter-attack: Man Ray and Desnos deliberately
i ncrusted UEtoile de Mer (1928) with purely poetic subtitles, free
of all utilitarian necessity. In his articles Desnos recalled the
extraordinary charm of the subtitles in Caligari ('Leave for a
moment, Casare, the depths of your night' — 'Until when shall I
live?' — 'Until dawn.'); in Destiny ('The town of the day before
yesterday') ; in Nosferatu ('Beyond the bridge he entered the
land of phantoms'). And I added my support: 'There is far more
literature in the visuals of Napoleon, and it is more irksome, than
in such sentences.'

All the same, the controversy had not been quite in vain insofar
as it had stimulated a demand for more precise visual meaning in
each shot, an exaction that is by no means wasted just because
speech has been added.

The Dream, the Unconscious

Until the war of 1914 Freud's works had remained almost un-
known in France except among specialists. Andre Breton some-
where relates his attempt to arouse interest in them in the three
men whose minds, from one direction or another, had most nearly
approached the same problems — Apollinaire, Valery and Gide —
an attempt that received not the slightest response. It was not
until the post-war years, by way of Switzerland, that the psycho-
analytical idea became widespread. In it, and in the extreme
emphasis laid upon dreams by the newborn surrealist movement,
are to be found one of the avant-garde's sources of inspiration.

'It seems as though moving pictures had been especially in-
vented to let us visualise our dreams', wrote Jean Tedesco.
'Expression by the film gives the greatest possible freedom to the
imagination; it allows it to rove about wherever it pleases, and
relate our most subtle wanderings . . . There has been no defi-
nite progress in the art of the film except in the case of those
courageous liberations of reality called The Cabinet of Doctor

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Caligari — a madman's dream — La Charrette Fantdme — a dream of
Nordic legend — and perhaps Le Brasier Ardent, a psychophysio-
logical dream.'

The poet and novelist Jules Supervielle voiced the same
attitude in different terms:

'Until now we have never known anything that could so easily
assimilate the unlikely. Film does away with transitions and
explanations, it confuses and makes us confuse reality with un-
reality. It can disintegrate and reintegrate anything. It has given
us faith in our dreams in an epoch when the difficulties of life and
the overtures of death have made us so distrustful ... I believe
it has helped me to escape from more than one labyrinth; it has
offered me the tools to pierce walls. And above all I am in its debt
for having delivered me from the tyranny of the probable.' (1925.)

As for Dr. Paul Ramain, between two articles on symphonic
cinema, he never failed to compose a third on 'oneiric' cinema,
and all without pushing the question one step forward.

It may be that the French are not very gifted for transcribing
their dreams. Though dreams preoccupied the whole of that
decade, there is small trace of them in French production,
whereas German, Swedish and American films teemed with
them. And among these few I can think of none that is worth
mentioning except Renoir's La Fille de VEau (1925), and none
that bears comparison with the admirable Wolfs Clothing (1927)
by Roy del Ruth, for instance, or the dream in Hollywood by
James Cruze.

Here, though, one must discriminate. In commercial production
a dream was generally made the excuse for introducing a non-
rational, marvellous or fantastic sequence. That is to say, that the
outcome of the artist's daydreams, or some myth sprung from the
collective unconscious of humanity, were often given as the free
play of an uncontrolled mind during sleep. There is no lack of
resemblance between these various moods of the imagination, but
one cannot be substituted for another without confusion. One day
that I reproached Rene Clair with failing to give a real dream
atmosphere to the Voyage Imaginaire, he replied that he was well
aware of it, but that if he had not pretended it was a dream, his
backers would not have advanced him a penny to work on such an

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illogical script. This sort of subterfuge was unnecessary for people
who were able to make short films 'on the fringe', and Rene Clair,
Fernand Leger and Man Ray (and later Bufiuel), all used the
shape and mechanism of dreams in their non-commercial films
without troubling to use sleep as a pretext.

In an article entitled Cinema and Surrealism (1925), Rene Clair
raised an important objection, calling into question the possibility
of spontaneous expression on the screen.

'What interests me in surrealism are the pure, extra- artistic
values it unveils. To translate it into visual image, the purest
surrealist conception, one would have to submit it to cinematic
technique, which would entail for this "pure psycho-automatism"
the risk of losing a great part of its purity . . . Even if the
cinema cannot be a perfect medium of expression for surrealism,
it still remains, in the spectator's mind, an incomparable field of
surrealist activity.'

Coming from the author of Entr'acte this reservation may seem
surprising, and as far as I am concerned I believe that one cannot
subscribe to it without again calling into question the part played
by inspiration in all the other arts, and particularly in painting.
There is no doubt that written and spoken poetry has alone,
through the centuries, shown itself equal to a close embrace with
every secret place and unconscious movement of the heart and
mind, because the medium it uses for their transcription — words
— is of all techniques the one most intimately a part of ourselves.
But the 'pure psycho-automatism' defined by surrealism does not
necessarily act in the abstract, in a vacuum. It can be set in
motion by the mere presence of one of the tools that serve to
transcribe its dictation by words or by visual images. Surrealism
has always admitted this interplay between the instrument and
the thought, whether conscious or unconscious. In the case of the
dream the objection holds even less. In fact it is only on awaking
that it is possible to write an account of a dream. There can be no
more question of directly imprinting a dream upon film than there
can be of gradually writing it down, or automatically painting it
on canvas.

It is therefore only through memory rising to the surface of
thought that the dream must purposely be objectified. From then

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on the artist's task in no way differs from an attempt to reproduce
exterior reality as faithfully as possible. For the author of a
film reality is not entirely copied from nature either. In either
case it is a matter of giving substance to memories: an act of
reconstruction that is conditioned by the gift of observation,
clarity of vision and the memory of the artist. There is no reason
that it should lose more of its purity here than in writing or
painting.

What still remains to be seen is whether this instrument is as
satisfying as the pen or the brush. During its first twenty-five
years the cinema was so absolutely incapable of realism that any
faithful representation of a dream was as impossible, purposely, as
the faithful copy of reality.

On the other hand, the film, even at that time, above all at that
time, often arrived at an involuntary simulation of the dream.
The theatre's twilight closes like an eyelid on the retina and turns
thought adrift from reality. The crowd that surrounds and isolates
one, the deliciously foolish music, the stiffness of neck just
necessary to rivet the eyes to the screen, all provoke a state quite
near dozing. On the wall white letters appear on a black background,
an obviously hypnagogic characteristic. In the days of the silent
film, when the projectionist was absent-minded, the words often
appeared the wrong way round, adding an appreciable reminder of
eidetic images.* And when at last the dazzling screen lights up
like a window, the very technique of the film is more evocative of
dreaming than waking. Images fade in from darkness and fade
out, they merge one into the other, the vision opens and closes
like a black iris, secrets are revealed through a keyhole, not a real
keyhole but the idea of a keyhole, a mental keyhole. The order of
the screen's images in time is absolutely similar to the arrange-
ment that thoughts or dreams can devise. Neither chronological
order nor the relative values of duration are real. Contrary to the
theatre the cinema, like the thought and the dream, chooses some
gestures, lessens or enlarges them, and eliminates others; it passes
hours, centuries, miles, in a few seconds; accelerates, slows, stops,
goes backwards. It is impossible to imagine a more faithful image
of mental processes. Against the will of most makers of films the
cinema is the least realistic of arts, even when the photographic

* c.f. Eidetic Imagery, by E. R. Jacnsch — Regan Paul.

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reproduction results in a concrete realism of the elements used.
That is why the cinema, never good at distinguishing between
perception and imagination, unwittingly shows us dreams.

But as fast as the language and material technique of the
cinema are perfected, familiarity with its conventions allows the
public to imagine, by mental transposition, a reality that is not
represented as such on the screen. Only then can dreams pur-
posely be transcribed without trusting too much to chance. Why
then have we seen so few that could possibly be authentic? The
illiteracy that is almost the general rule on the subject should no
doubt be blamed: very few people are capable of remembering or
relating their dreams without submitting them to unbelievable
rationalizations, distortions and exaggerations. And one must
agree with Andre Breton that 'the organizing powers of the mind
do not like having to reckon with the apparently disorganizing
powers . . . the dignity of man is sorely enough tried by the tenor
of his dreams for him not often to feel the need of thinking about
them, still less of relating them . . .' (Les Vases Communicants,)

Avant-Garde Documentary

Though the boldest innovators, in spite of the dream's attraction
for them, did not dare tackle it, or plunged into it awkwardly,
though few of them were gifted both with sufficient imagination
and lightness of touch to venture on the marvellous, the third
avant-garde period, on the other hand, made a step forward in its
discovery of outward reality. Cavalcanti with Rien que les Heures
(1925) and Rene Clair with La Tour (1926) introduced this new
turn of thought into documentary, which hitherto had been singu-
larly sheltered from it. Andre Sauvage with Images de Paris
(1928), Vigo with A Propos de Nice (1930) and Bunuel with Terre
sans Pain (1932), were to carry their explorations further still,
and a whole generation of young enthusiasts soon found a means
of expression in documentary and asserted themselves enough to
force the studio gates. Marc Allegret became known through
Voyage au Congo (1927), Georges Lacombe with La Zone (1928),
Marcel Carne with Nogent Eldorado du Dimanche, Pierre Chenal
with Architecture.

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Cavalcanti's En Rade (1926—27) must be classed apart, as it is
impossible to decide whether it is a documentary that tells a
story, or a story so reduced to its simplest expression as to be
almost a documentary. The exceptional quality of the photo-
graphy would have made it an admirable documentary had it not
been for the excessive slowness of the action and acting, re-
calling the conventionalism glorified by Lupu Pick, and signally
exemplified by the weighty, paralysed acting of Werner Krauss
in German films of the decadent period.

Experiments and discoveries, even those that seemed in-
congruous in certain fiction films, often found their ideal place
quite naturally in documentary, where there was no action to be
interrupted by them and where the freedom to explore the world
from every angle and in every direction could go untrammelled by
a dramatic thread. Documentary set itself to discovering the
world's beauty and horror, the marvels contained in the most
ordinary object infinitely magnified, fantasy in the spectacle of the
streets and nature. Strictly speaking, all such possibilities had
been foreseen as early as 1882 by Jules Etienne Marey, and by his
pupils, Lucien Bull, Nogues and Doctor Comandon, who had con-
tinued his work. They made scientific films, of which no notice was
taken, and their achievements remained unknown to the public
until they were shown at the Vieux Colombier in 1924. There is no
denying that the tardy discovery of A Soap Bubble Bursting, A
Bullet going through a Board, The Flight of a Dragon-Fly in ultra
slow motion, and the Germination and Accelerated Growth of a Plant
did much to turn avant-garde towards documentary. The young
biologist, Jean Painleve, attracted at first to surrealism in 1924,
ended by turning to scientific films in which he found fullest expres-
sion.

It must also be remembered that avant-garde documentary
discovered the picture-postcard with Tour au Large (1926), by
Jean Gremillon, who fortunately has since done better.

Montage Films

A few people began to realize that newsreel cameramen had some-
times recorded incomparable spectacles all in the day's work,

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without troubling themselves about meaning or artistic values.
Cutting could endow them with both art and meaning. The first
attempt of the sort seems to have been made by Jean Epstein with
Photogenies (1925). Then the idea was dropped, until Walter
Ruttman's Melodie du Monde in 1930 came to demonstrate the
extraordinary riches that lay hidden among the files of newsreels
and documentaries. At the same time Paul Gilson had been mak-
ing Manieres de Croire, a newsreel montage, which was shown in
the specialized cinema, Studio 28, in 1930. But apart from a few
isolated attempts, this line was little followed up. No doubt an
author's self-respect prevents his using films 'ready-made' by
other people. When I was editing the first two reels of news for
La Vie est a Nous (1936), by Jean Renoir, then later, when I com-
posed a montage documentary the following year, Records 37, I
found myself on almost virgin soil, the only lesson I could occasion-
ally follow being Ruttman's Melodie du Monde.

The commercial vulgarization of this method by the March of
Time series succeeded in putting off possible enthusiasts. Yet this
discovery of the avant-garde, with its innumerable possibilities
barely explored, has just been used afresh by Nicole Vedres, whose
film Paris 1900 has once more restored to a place of honour,
twenty years later, an unexploited vein of gold.

Fourth Period: Dissolution of the Avant-Garde

The fourth and last period of the avant-garde, that saw both the
culmination and disintegration of this spirit of adventure, can be
dated from 1928.

This was the year when two young Spaniards, recently arrived
in Paris, prepared the bomb they were to throw into artistic circles,
a bomb that still makes the aesthetes shudder: Un Chien Andalou,

The director, Luis Bufiuel, had been until then an obscure
assistant-director, and the only public appearance of his name
had been at the end of an article on Napoleon by Gance in Cahiers
a" Art (1927, No. 3). Nothing was yet known of Salvador Dali, who
collaborated with him on the script. His first one-man exhibition
in Paris was not held until December 1929, and the first reproduc-

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tions of his paintings appeared in the Revolution Surr^aliste No.
12, 15th December 1929. He has made a good deal of headway
since then along his deliberately chosen path to easy success and
the flattery of the great, and his choice has won him a nickname
from his former surrealist friends: Avida Dollars. But in 1928
Dali was thinking only of new discoveries.

The scenario of Un Chien Andalou reasserted the importance of
the anecdote, and discarded all virtuosity that added nothing to
the subject. The whole effort of Dali and Bufiuel bore on the
content of the film, and they loaded it with all their obsessions, all
the images of their personal mythology, deliberately made it
violent and harrowing. As for the container, Bufiuel gave it the
simplest possible form, neglecting no resource of a technique he
was thoroughly conversant with, but austerely refraining from
the quick cutting, multiple superimpositions, and houses photo-
graphed upside down, that his predecessors had worked to death
to Spater le bourgeois. Bufiuel was not interested in the bourgeois
eye. In one of the first shots a brutal razor-cut through a crystal-
line lens intimates that people hoping to have their retina
deliciously tickled by artistic photography have picked the wrong
film. If the bourgeois delights in being shocked may the shock
at least be a deep one. This film confronts the spectator with
himself, with his own distresses, his phantasms, his obscure im-
pulses, his unavowed desires and moral fumblings.

People tried to see more invention in Un Chien Andalou than
it really contained. For instance, the Marist brothers and the
putrefying donkeys that appeared so surprising, were seen later
in Bunuel's documentary Terre sans Pain to be familiar features of
Spanish road-sides. Many of the elements composing the film
were the relics of things seen or experienced. It is their arrange-
ment in the film that identifies them with mental imagery, just
as dreams use the day's memories, and as myths are composed
from shreds of history.

The year before, Germaine Dulac too had undertaken a poetic
scenario by the surrealist poet Antonin Artaud: La Coquille et le
Clergyman, but it had been spoilt by Alex Allin's poor acting and
drowned in such a deluge of technical tricks that only a few
admirable shots could struggle to the surface.

Un Chien Andalou came just in time to shake the blind confi-

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dence in the lens, the cameraman, and laboratory tricks, which
had fostered the habit of forgetting to endow scenes with any
meaning at all. This tendency reached full development in films
like La Marche des Machines by Deslav (1928) which relied wholly
upon the beauty and rhythm of moving pieces of metal without
even a social ingredient, a film still more abstract than the squares
in movement in Ruttmann's Opus.

The reinstatement of a passionate human element at its highest
point of incandescence dominates this period. Some films were
still to follow earlier lines: Man Ray made Le Mystere du Chateau
du De (1929); Cavalcanti, La PHite Lili (1928) andLe Petit Chaper-
on Rouge (1929); Joris Ivens, Pluie (1928); Kirsanov, Brumes
d'Automne (1928); Germaine Dulac, Disque No. 957 (1930). But
Bunuel's influence was to haunt the years to come, and he it was
that Georges Hugnet and Henri d'Arches tried to follow with La
Perle (1929), Jean Cocteau and Michel Arnaud with Le Sang
d'un Poke (1930-31). Bunuel's second film, VAge d'Or (1930-31),
eclipsed all these and beside it they paled into insignificance.

Un Chien Andalou, its authors not in the least troubling to
use a dream as justification, comes very near to being one. The
dramatic vehicle they employed was less limited, it is true,
but in it all the well-known mechanism of condensation and dis-
placement were recognizable. Obsessions, the lees of experience
remembered, were dramatized in an irrational form, as they
might have been in the dream of an adolescent possessed with the
torment of love. There is no great need to be an expert in symbol-
ism to understand that in the scene where the young man is
prepared to take the girl by erotic assault, what he drags behind
him with superhuman effort at the end of two ropes, from the
lightest to the heaviest objects — corks, melons, priests, pianos
filled with donkey-carrion — are the memories of his childhood and
upbringing. It can hardly be necessary to enlarge on the interpre-
tation. The film is sufficient to itself. But this is enough to show
that the whole script is dedicated to those forces and obstacles of
a subjective order that oppose the formation of a human couple.
There is no need to search for obscurities in it.

VAge d?Or, a talking film, is much farther from the dream.
There is indeed the same central subjective theme as in Un Chien
Andalou, with the love scene in the park, that frightening illustra-

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tion of the clumsiness of lovers. But this time the film, completing
its forerunner, is above all attached to exterior, objective
obstacles. IS Age (POr, moral rather than poetic, is clearly an
attack on the ethics of the civilization and society we live in, in
the face of which it defends a great forbidden love. It is the
'important mission' he is given that the man must neglect, and her
family's respectability that the young girl must brave in order that
they shall join each other. It is no accident that the music of
Tristan and Isolde is heard. Nor did the apparent irrationality
of the onslaught hoodwink those who felt themselves attacked.

While IS Age d'Or was being made, a rumour went round that
Cocteau, on learning that Bunuel was shooting a scene with a cow
in bed, hastily introduced a cow into his film. I doubt whether
much credence need be given this rumour, and in any case the
results are all that matters.

The results were that Bunuel's cow was a real cow, whose bells
in the girl's bedroom conjured up visions of the Alps and the sky.
Then suddenly, a long way away, we see the man she loves dragged
down the street between two plain-clothes policemen (Vaches,
cows, in French slang) surprisingly transforming what had
seemed bucolic metaphor into sombre irony. Without the
slightest over-emphasis images were made to say a good deal. The
cow in Le Sang d'un Poete was merely content with looking like an
artistic overmantel in a decorator's shop-window. The violent
impact of U Age d^Or owes little or nothing to its technique, which
is very poor compared with the sumptuous photographic effects
created by Perinal, Cocteau's first-rate cameraman.

Death of the Avant-Garde

It was the end. Everyone appeared to realize the sterility of
research for pure form, and on the other hand, since the police
ban on UAge d'Or, resulting from the provocation organized
against it by young fascists, that any new attempt to defy con-
vention with such insolence would be made in vain.

In the review Documents (No. 7) and in the Revue du Cinema
(No. 8, March 1930) Robert Desnos buried the avant-garde:

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'An exaggerated respect for art, a cult for expression, have led
a whole group of producers, actors and spectators to the creation
of avant-garde cinema, remarkable for the rapidity with which its
productions go out of fashion, its absence of human emotion and
the danger into which it leads the whole cinema.

'Understand me. When Rene Clair and Picabia made Entr'acte,
Man Ray Uetoile de Mer, and Bunuel his admirable Chien
Andalou, there was no question of creating a work of art or a new
aesthetic, but of obeying movements that were deep-seated and
original, and demanded therefore a new form.

'No, here I am attacking films like L' Inhumaine, Le Montreur
d'Ombres* and the sort that show twenty-four hours in thirty
minutes . . .

'I will not dwell — or not much — upon the ridicule of our actors.
The comparison between photographs of Bancroft and Jacques
Catelain being more than enough to show the vanity and ludi-
crousness of the latter, whom we may take as a prototype of the
avant-garde actor, just as is M. Marcel L'Herbier of the director.

'The use of technical contraptions uncalled for by the action,
conventional acting, pretentiousness in expressing arbitrary and
complicated movements of the soul, are the chief characteristics
of the cinema one might baptize the cinema of hairs in the soup . . .

'. . . To project one of their moth-eaten films before or after
Stroheim's admirable Wedding March would be enough to convict
them of humbuggery. . . .

'. . . Nothing is revolutionary but outspokenness. Lies and
insincerity are characteristic of all reaction. And it is this frank-
ness that now allows us to place on the same footing Potemkin,
The Goldrush, The Wedding March and Un Chien Andalou, while
we cast into outer darkness & Inhumaine, Panam n'est pas Paris,
and La Chute de la Maison Usher, in which Epstein's lack of
imagination, or rather his paralysed imagination, were exposed.'

The Avant-Garde Heritage

In 1932 Bunuel turned towards documentary with Terre sans
Pain, and two newcomers, the brothers Jacques and Pierre

* French title of the German film Warning Shadows.

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PreVert, made a burlesque film, V Affaire est dans le Sac, a new
type of audaciousness, that brought them no audience but that
of the specialized cinemas. These two films, barely noticed at the
time, though they have since become part of the stock of every
cine-club, marked the end of an epoch. But a new one was open-
ing, and during its course the French cinema was to produce some
of its most notable work. It is interesting to note that it was
between 1930 and 1934 that the French film industry gave the
first signs of trying to get out of its rut. There is undoubtedly
some significance in this order of events, some connection between
the rather sudden improvement in commercial production and
the fact that at this time a new generation of young men, brought
up on documentary and avant-garde, was just gaining access to
the studios and film companies. It is the time when Jean Vigo,
Jacques Prevert and Marcel Carne came to join Clair and Renoir,
that extraordinary brilliant period when, in the space of a few
months, we saw Zero de Conduite, La Maternelle, Le Grand Jeu,
Lac aux Dames, Toni, Le Dernier Milliardaire, Jenny, L'Atalante,
all films embracing a part — the most valid and cogent part at
least — of the avant-garde heritage.

One must no doubt take other attendant circumstances into
account when explaining this occurrence. The advantage given to
French production, for instance, by the talking film, diminishing
as it did American competition on the home market, and also the
greater ease that French actors and authors found with words.
Nor must one forget the gift Hitler made us when he proceeded
to 'clean up' the studios in the Nazi manner. Among the exiles
were several first-rate technicians and four or five intelligent pro-
ducers, gifted with a taste for risk and a shrewd flair for new
talent. This said, it is no less apparent that the avant-garde
period had served to prepare, ripen, teach and select a new
personnel.

The most important lesson to be learned from this adventurous
decade was perhaps a negative one: that no sleight of hand, no
optical tour de force even, were of the slightest use until a basic
technique, equal at least to that of Hollywood, had been mastered.
The first essentials were to learn how to build sets, make up actors,
how to light and photograph them, how to record sound. It was
between 1930 and 1934 that French studio technicians hurriedly

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caught up, guided by some German and American cameramen
and sound-engineers, and a few Frenchmen who had had the
luck to go and perfect themselves in Hollywood or Neubabelsberg.

One of the men to whom the French cinema owes most is un-
deniably the Russian art-director Lazare Meerson. Not only was
he without question the first man to provide Rene Clair, Jacques
Feyder and others with the first scenery worthy of the name (Sous
les Toits de Paris, for example), but he gathered round him, at the
Tobis Studios, a number of young art-directors whose names today
are on every credit-title, particularly Trauner, architect of nearly
all the Prevert and Carne films, among others Le Jour se Leve.

Avant-garde's other lesson, also a negative one, but to which
Bunuel's films brought the positive counterpart, was the resur-
gence of the content.

To make sure of giving their films a scenario and dialogue with
some poetic, moral or social meaning, Carne, Allegret, Renoir,
called upon a man like Jacques Prevert, whose influence on other
script and dialogue writers soon made itself felt. From then on the
script-writer's importance was acknowledged, and the best films
were associated with the names of Henri Jeanson, Marcel Achard,
Charles Spaak, Jacques Viot.

Though the avant-garde, then, in its most extreme and char-
acteristic form had disappeared, it does not follow that the spirit
of adventure and research was dead. If those representing this
spirit made films 'on the fringe' no longer it was because the film
industry had for the most part absorbed them, but it had by no
means quite broken them in.

Gremillon directed La Petite Lise. Cavalcanti still had so-called
commercial scenarios thrust on him and had to work on them
without pleasure, but he was soon to reappear in documentary in
London. Autant-Lara, in 1933, thanks to Jacques Prevert's
collaboration, succeeded in transforming Cihoulette, an ordinary
operetta chosen by the producer for its popular success on the
stage, into a fairy-tale. Bunuel, engaged by Hollywood, wasted
his time there.

In an attic in the Theatre du Vieux Colombier Berthold Bartosch
cut out and pasted together small pieces of cardboard that
were to compose his film Idee (1934). In a little Vaugirard studio,
Alexeief and Parker pushed steel pins through a white screen,

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creating shadows that came to life to illustrate La Nuit sur le
Mont Chauve (Night on the Bare Mountain, 1934). These are per-
haps the last representatives of a cinema 'on the fringe'. Here-
after the strangest cinematic games were accepted by the public,
as was proved by the reception given to three minute publicity
films made by Jean Aurenche and myself for showing during
intervals. In one of them, for instance, a young bride in a
white veil parachuted out of the plane that was taking her on her
honeymoon, and then, her parachute reinflating, she was wafted
back to the plane carrying the case of N . . . wine that she had
forgotten. In another, a diver for treasure -trove brought out of
the Seine an arm-chair from the Galeries B ... in a perfect
state of preservation. Such absurdities, and others like them, not
only astonished nobody, but were considered excellent publicity
by the worthy tradespeople concerned.

If one wanted to take stock of the avant-garde heritage, each
individual case would have to be examined, and it will be enough
to mention outstanding figures: Vigo, Renoir, Prevert and Carne.

The Cocteau chapter seems to me finally closed by the state-
ment that it took no great courage to disguise Jean Marais as
a handsome S.S. man in UEternal Retour, made under the
Occupation.

Jean Vigo

Vigo's activity in the cinema took place between 1927 and 1934.
He left only very few films: two documentaries and two feature
films. But all are unforgettable. He was only twenty-nine when
he died of endocarditis in 1934.

When I saw him for the last time, a few months earlier, he had
seemed exhausted, but I had not paid very much attention, as he
was always delicate-looking, and moreover, as the last scenes of
UAtalante were then being shot his fatigue seemed quite natural.
He had only one more scene of the film to make, in a railway-
station at night, but his producer had cut off funds. The actors,
the cameraman still under contract, and the electric unit group
still on hire, were at his disposal, but not a penny could be spent

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on extras. Louis Chavance (who later wrote the script for Le
Corbeau) was Vigo's assistant, and he had spent the whole day
searching through the telephone directory and the cafes of St.
Germain des Pres, rounding up volunteer extras. And so it was
that in the almost deserted Austerlitz station hundreds of friends
were gathered, with the wives, mothers and sisters of friends, and
friends of friends. A sharp-eyed spectator can recognize in the
station crowd of L1 Atalante people who have since become famous
in literature, painting, poetry and the cinema, notably the
brothers Jacques and Pierre Prevert who undertook to amuse the
company all through the night. V Atalante could be finished. But
before it was shown to the public the producer thought it neces-
sary to soften what was too cruel in Vigo's outlook on life. Here
and there a song by Lys Gauty, having nothing to do with the
story, sweetened with its sugary sentiment scenes in which real
emotion, veiled by irony, burst out in brief moments of ardour
and anguish. For some months the film took the title of the song,
Le Chaland qui Passe (The Passing Barge). But Vigo had left a
vigorous imprint on his characters and images, and Le Chaland
qui Passe is forgotten and only L1 Atalante remembered. Had he
lived he could have shared in its triumph, and today would
probably be the first director in France, but of this destiny he was
to know only the difficult years. He was assistant-cameraman to
begin with and soon learned the technique. From 1927 to 1930 he
walked about the streets of Nice with a small cine-camera hidden
under his coat, implacably taking by surprise the oddities and
ugliness of wintering visitors, the Carnival's plaster hideous-
ness, the poverty-stricken dignity of the old quarters. A harsh and
savage documentary, A Propos de Nice was shown to none but
the specialized audiences of the Ursulines. As for ZSro de Conduite
(1933), for sixteen years banned by the censor, it has been seen
only quite recently. Apparently the children in it failed in proper
respect to their pastors and masters.

Marcel Carne -Jacques Prevert

The year 1934 saw the rise of two men who have since become
famous. Marcel Carne\ Feyder's assistant and the author of a

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little documentary on the Parisians' Sunday outings (Nogent),
that year presented Jenny.

Jacques Prevert, whom he had asked to write the dialogue, had
ventured only twice into the cinema. He had adapted and written
the dialogue of L1 Affaire est dans le Sac for his brother Pierre, and
had been gagman for Ciboulette. But his friends knew that this
poet who did not publish his poems, who more often than not lost
them,* had written many scenarios since about 1927. In 1931
the actor Pierre Batcheff considered becoming a film director and
was looking out for a subject. I had introduced the two Preverts
to him, and we had undertaken the shooting-script of one of
Jacques' scenarios, Emile-Emile. But the film was never made,
and BatchefF's suicide the following year put an end to our plans.
U Affaire est dans le Sac had been a commercial failure in 1932.
The Preverts' wry humour disconcerted spectators instead of
making them laugh, for they saw themselves too clearly in the
odious or ridiculous figures on the screen.

Jacques Prevert's cruelty had to be enveloped by Carne in a
faultless cinematic technique, his bitter rejoinders had to be
spoken by the best actors before they were at last accepted.
Since then the public has avidly picked up every gauntlet they
have cared to fling down. Except for Hotel du Nord with Henri
Jeanson's dialogue, there is not one film by Carne whose scenario
has not been adapted and the dialogue written by Jacques Pre-
vert; not one that has not had the benefit of the best cameraman,
the best art-director, the best actors. To this combination of
talents are owed Drole de Drame (1937), Quai des Brumes (1937),
Le Jour seLeve (1939).

Les Portes de la Nuit (1946) has proved, alas, that the most
beautiful poetic sentences fall flat if they issue from the mouth of
an actress so ungifted as Nathalie Nattier, or an actor so inexperi-
enced as Montand: that Prevert's humour, in which deliberate
banalities alternate with lightning aphorisms, cannot stand up to
heavy acting and directing: that the best photography in the world
and the most expensive sets cannot justify a film's lasting for two
hours when nothing in the story calls for more than the usual ninety

* Except for a few texts published in the magazines Commerce, Bifur, Revue du
Cinimay Documents, Minotaure, Prevert had published nothing before his first collec-
tion of poems, Paroles (1945).

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minutes. It is to be hoped that Carne is now aware of all this.
As for Jacques Prevert's most wonderful scenarios, they are
still imprisoned in drawers.

Jean Renoir

The most curious case is perhaps that of Jean Renoir. After La
Fille de UEau and Nana, he had acquired a regrettable reputation
in those circles that decide what makes money and what does not,
and neither Charleston nor La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes had
been of a nature to raise his commercial stock. With Le Bled and
Le Tournoi dans la Cite (1927) he had tried, without much success,
to return to favour, with the sole result of discouraging the very
people who had admired his films. Then silence. In 1931 he
suddenly reappeared with La Chienne, compelling recognition as
one of the rare French directors who counted. His difficulties were
not over. He still had to make Boudu and La Nuit du Carrefour
(1932) before firing his friends' enthusiasm by Le Crime de
Monsieur Lange (script and dialogue by Jacques Prevert), Mad-
ame Bovary and Toni (1934). It was during the subsequent period
of disfavour that he undertook Partie de Campagne (1936), which
was to be made almost entirely out-of-doors, with very little
money, and all the actors and collaborators working on a co-
operative basis with a percentage of the profits. Interrupted by
persistent bad weather and his following contract, Renoir had to
drop the film, which was shown unfinished only ten years later.
But in the meantime something had mysteriously happened.
Without realizing it, Renoir had become 'box-office', and after
making Bas-Fonds, certainly not his best film, he never ceased to
work until he brought out his admirable Regie du Jeu just before
the war, a film in which all the intrepidity of the avant-garde
survives, in which, from time to time, something like an echo of
L'Age d'Or can be discerned.

Where have we got to now?

It is 1947, and when I repeat that the cinema suffers increasingly
from a surfeit of 'masterpieces' I know the most respectable film

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critics will either boil with indignation or sneer: I must explain
once more what I mean by this statement.

I am thinking of those films in which apparently so little
remains to be desired that we wonder why they fulfil our desires
so ill. It would be quite difficult to find anyone in the studio
population today who does not know the film classics by heart,
and the few Golden Rules that you feed into a slot-machine, and
after a little juggling, of which the best script- writers and
directors have divulged the secret, you take out a nice job of
work at the other end. Everywhere skill triumphs over imagi-
nation, technique over real emotion, and tricks have replaced
poetry. A straining after glib effects has succeeded the quest
for new delights, and stale solemnity has comfortably settled
down where adventure reigned no more than twenty-five years
ago.

That all youthfulness is not certainly lost we have been able to
see in the rebirth of the English and Italian cinema, following on
the renaissance of the French cinema. But it is a St. Martin's
summer rather than a new adolescence, a renewal that bears the
already visible signs of a menopause.

Yes, the cinema has grown up, and at first sight it may seem
unfair to reproach it for having at last acquired seriousness and
savoir-faire, for having at last temerity enough to tackle the great
themes with which the novel and the theatre have long been
familiar. But if savoir-faire means only knowing how without
knowing what to do nor even what one is doing, if getting licked
into shape makes one rigid rather than supple, if the acquisition
of more subtle insight is merely a pretext for narrowness, it will
be agreed that the cinema, in becoming a fifty-year-old besotted
with respectability, has simply impoverished itself.

I will go still further: under the over-elegant suit it wears to
enter the portals of the Academy in the company of its elders, the
other arts, the cinema's senility has already set in. Even the un-
believable follies it emits with solemn mien and super-colossal
technique can no longer be taken for the childlike naivete of
yesterday's pioneers, but rather for the dotage and infantilism of
old age. All that the most promising people can do in the heart of
this false maturity is to accomplish something essential enough
not to be unworthy of so much pretentiousness, but even the

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EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE

youngest among them immediately lose their freshness.

The world of exploration that once seemed open to the cinema
has been shrunk out of recognition by this epidemic of pomposity.
It is trite to deplore the disappearance of slapstick, though every
revival of it proves its lasting possibility of success. It is becoming
almost impossible to compose a programme for children, and we
must pity the generation whose laughter is starved by the Three
Stooges instead of being nourished by Polycarpe and Onesyme,
Chester Conklin or Ben Turpin, Harold Lloyd or Roscoe Arbuckle:
and that other generation reduced to dreaming of Ingrid Berg-
man, Danielle Darrieux and Vivien Leigh instead of Garbo,
Corinne Griffith and Pola Negri. Nor are grown-ups better served:
where are Nanook and Moana, La Travers4e du Grepon, and
Images de Paris, the Williamson brothers' undersea films, where
are Paris qui Dort and Berkeley Square, The Covered Wagon and La
Croisiere Noire, Le Voyage Imaginaire and Peter Ibbetson?

Even though recent technical progress is opening every door,
the more omnipotent the cinema becomes the more it confines
itself to a few restricted formulas. If Cervantes, Swift and Lewis
Carroll lived among us and were tempted to express themselves
through the cinema, one can hardly conceive their being in a
position to put on the screen the Don Quixote, the Gulliver or the
Alice who would reward the hopes of both children and grown-
ups. Wonder and adventure have deserted the screen, and the
little that remains has congealed into window-displays for chain
stores, dressed by aesthetes of the Russian ballet.

Even when it leads temporarily to a sound and valid realism,
each attempt to 'purge by reality' leads with incredible speed
to new mannerisms, a new set of ready-made conventions
no less academic than those it had served to wash away.

The cinema has taken to thinking, philosophising and analy-
sing, to giving itself all the airs of a psychologist, moralist, socio-
logist. On this ground it is hampered by so many obstacles that
far from being able to compete with books, it succeeds only in
appearing rigged out in Sunday best. Great social themes are
invariably paralysed by the conformities of their native countries,
and psychological subtleties gazed at through the magnifying-
glass of 'box-office' turn into inflated truisms.

The cinema has swallowed a poker.

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How can we refrain from looking nostalgically — with a nostal-
gia that holds no sterile regrets for the past, but rather hopes for
a future foreshadowed but unrealized — towards the cinema's
adolescence, an adolescence whose twenty-five-year-old growing-
pains were the Avant-garde?

The Need for a new Avant-garde

Independently of mistakes made and of the value of each work,
the honour of the 1920's spirit of renewal lies in having broken the
routine of a growing academism, of having entertained every
ambition, however unjustified. The following words, written by
Jacques Feyder in 1925, illustrate the spirit of the time:

'The opinion that such and such a work is visual and such another
is not is frequently voiced. It is a simple explanation disguising im-
potence. All literary, theatrical and musical works are, or can be
made, visual. It is only the cinematic conception of certain film-
makers that is not always so. Everything can be translated onto
the screen, everything can be expressed by the visual image.

'It is just as possible to draw an arresting and human film from
the tenth chapter of Montesquieu's VEsprit des Lois as from a
page of The Physiology of Marriage, from a paragraph of Nietsche's
Zarathustra as from a novel by Paul de Kock.'

Such expectations inevitably begat disappointment, or Dali's
haughty attitude in the days before he had founded his commer-
cial undertaking for prefabricated dream- settings in Hollywood:

'Contrary to current opinion, the cinema is infinitely poorer and
more limited in its means of expressing real processes of thought
than are writing, painting, sculpture or architecture.' (Preface to
Babaouo, An Abridged Critical History of the Cinema, 1932.)

One may search in vain through the remainder of the text for
the smallest proof of this contention, which Dali's and Bufiuel's
work in fact directly contradicts.

It may be that the cinema falls so easy a prey to periods of
optimism and extreme pessimism.

If you make the experiment of declaring in public that it is a

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mistake to treat such and such a subject in the cinema as it is
clearly not in its line, and you then, five minutes later, assert that
the cinema's mediocrity and paucity are unjustifiable and un-
accountable— for after all every subject is open to it — you will find
that your listeners accept both your statements as true without
noticing that they seem to contradict each other.

In fact I do not think it possible to maintain that the cinema
should and must take the place on every occasion of other means
of expression. No subject is forbidden it, but neither economic
and social conditions, nor the time to which a film must limit
itself, can allow it to stand on equal terms with books, poetry and
painting. A film could be made on the very subject I am treating
now, but it would take a week to project it, and what producer
would undertake it?

On the other hand, insofar as expression of thought is con-
cerned, it is obvious that the cinema, capable of ringing every
change that pictures, movement, sound and language afford,
easily surpasses the possibilities of any other plastic or literary
art. And if the use it makes of this almost unlimited vocabulary is
disappointing, it is partly because it has to reckon with the per-
manent limitations set by its commercial substructure. When the
thoughts expressed in a film are base, there is no denying that
they perfectly reflect the baseness of those responsible for it. The
subtlety and suppleness of the medium are not implicated.

Perhaps general human weakness must be indicted. It is pre-
cisely owing to its richness and versatility that the cinema makes
it difficult for one man to keep entire control of the images, words
and gestures. Often enough a film leaves the head of its creator
and the hands of his colleagues like a ship after a storm, as best it
may, loaded not only with what they meant to say, but also with
other things that no one wished to imply. But how fascinating is
the part played by chance in this clash of wills !

The role of an avant-garde that wanted to try and break some
of the comfortable habits into which the cinema is beatifically
sinking today, might be to become fully aware of the cinema's
potentialities, and of what it had best abandon, at least for a
time. There is no doubt that the first part of the programme
could give us films such as we have never seen.

(Translated by Mary Kesteven)

112

21. A Propos de Nice
(Jean Vigo, France, 1930)

22. U Affaire est dans le Sac
(Pierre Prevert, France, 1932)

23. Nuit sur le Mont Chauve
(Alexeief and Parker, France, 1934)

24. Plague Summer
(Chester Kessler, U.S.A., 1947)

26. Synchronization

(Joseph Schillinger and Lewis
Jacobs, U.S.A., 1934)

25. H20

(Ralph Steiner, U.S.A., 1929)

27. A Hollywood Extra

(Slavko Vorkapich and Robert
Florey, U.S.A., 1928)

AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

BY LEWIS JACOBS

experimental cinema in America has had little in common
with the main stream of the motion picture industry. Living a
kind of private life of its own, its concern has been solely with
motion pictures as a medium of artistic expression. This emphasis
upon means rather than content not only endows experimental
films with a value of their own but distinguishes them from all
other commercial, documentary, educational and amateur pro-
ductions. Although their influence upon the current of film
expression has been deeper than generally realized, the movement
has always been small, its members scattered, its productions
sporadic, and for the most part viewed by few.

In Europe the term for experimental efforts — the avant-garde
— has an intellectual connotation signifying this intent. But in
America experimenters saw their work referred to as 'amateur'.
This expression was used not in a laudatory sense, but in a
derogatory one. Lack of regard became an active force, inhibiting
and retarding productivity. In the effort to overcome outside
disdain, experimental film-makers in the United States tended to
become cliquey and in-bred, often ignorant of the work of others
with similar aims. There was little interplay and exchange of ideas
and sharing of discoveries. But with post-war developments in
this field, the old low attitude has been supplanted by a new
regard and the experimental film-maker has begun to be looked
upon with respect. Today the word 'amateur' is no longer used; it
has been dropped in favour of the word experimenter.

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

The American experimental movement was born in a period of
artistic ferment in the motion picture world. During the decade
1921—31 sometimes alluded to as 'the golden period of silent films',
movies were attaining new heights in expression. Innovations in
technique, content and structural forms were being introduced in
America in films from Germany, France and Russia: The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari, Waxworks, The Golem, Variety, The Last Laugh,
Ballet Mecanique, Entr'acte, The Fall of the House of Usher, Emak
Bakia, The Italian Straw Hat, Therese Raquin, Passion of Joan of
Arc, Potemkin, End of St. Petersburg, Ten Days, The Man ivith the
Camera, Arsenal, Fragment of an Empire, Soil or Earth.

'The foreign invasion' as it came to be called enlarged the
aesthetic horizons of American movie-makers, critics and writers
and fostered native ambitions. Intellectuals hitherto indifferent
or hostile now began to look upon the cinema as a new art form.
Books, essays, articles and even special film magazines appeared
extolling the medium's potentialities and its brilliant future.
Film Guilds, Film Societies, Film Forums, and special art
theatres devoted to showing 'the unusual, the experimental, the
artistic film' sprung up so that by the end of the decade the film
as a new art form was not only widely recognized but inspired
partisans and productions.

Young artists, photographers, poets, novelists, dancers, archi-
tects, eager to explore the rich terrain of movie expression, learned
how to handle a camera and with meagre resources attempted
pictures of their own making. In most cases the expense proved
so great that efforts were aborted. In others, the technique was
not equal to the imagination, and in still others the ideas were not
fully formed but fragmentary and improvisational depending
upon the moment's inspiration. Consequently while there was -a
great deal of activity and talk, hardly any experimental films
were completed at this time. It was not until the main current of
foreign pictures had waned — around 1928 — that experimental
cinema in America really got under way.

Two films were finished in the early'twenties, however, which
stand out as landmarks in American experiment: Manhatta (1921)
and 24 Dollar Island (1925). Both pictures showed an independ-
ence of approach and probed an aspect of film expression that had
not been explored by the film-makers from abroad.

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

Manhatta was a collaborative effort of Charles Sheeler, the
modern painter, and Paul Strand, a photographer and disciple of
Alfred Steiglitz. Their film — one reel in length — attempted to
express New York through its essential characteristics — power
and beauty, movement and excitement. The title was taken from
a poem by Walt Whitman and excerpts from the poem were used
as subtitles.

In technique the film was simple, direct, avoiding all the so-
called 'tricks' of photography and setting and in a sense was the
forerunner for the documentary school which rose in the United
States in the middle 'thirties. Manhatta revealed a discerning eye
and a disciplined camera. Selected angle shots achieved quasi-
abstract compositions: a Staten Island ferry boat makes its way
into the South Ferry pier, crowds of commuters are suddenly
released into the streets of lower Manhattan, an ocean liner aided
by tugboats, docks, pencil-like office buildings stretch upward
into limitless space, minute restless crowds of people throng deep,
narrow skyscraper canyons; silvery smoke and steam rise plume-
like against filtered skies; massive shadows and sharp sunlight
form geometric patterns.

The picture's emphasis upon visual pattern using the real
world was an innovation for the times and resulted in a striking
impression of New York such as had not been seen before.

Manhatta was presented as a 'short' on the programme of
several large theatres in New York City. But by and large it went
unseen. In Paris, where it appeared as evidence of American
modernism on a dadaist programme which included music by
Erik Satie and poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, it received
something of an ovation. In the late 'twenties the film was shown
around New York at private gatherings and in some of the first
art theatres. Its influence, however, was felt more in the world of
still photography, then making an upsurge, than in the field of
experimental films.

Employing the same approach as Manhatta and having much
in common with it was Robert Flaherty's picture of New York
city and its harbour: 24 Dollar Island. The director had already
established a style of his own and a reputation in such pictures as
Nanook of the North and Moana. In those films his major interest
lay in documenting the lives and manners of primitive people. In

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

24 Dollar Island people were irrelevant. Flaherty conceived the
film as 'a camera poem, a sort of architectural lyric where people
will be used only incidently as part of the background'.

Flaherty's camera like Strand's- Sheeler's sought the Metro-
politan spirit in silhouettes of buildings against the sky, deep
narrow skyscraper canyons, sweeping spans of bridges, the flurry
of pressing crowds, the reeling of subway lights. Flaherty also
emphasized the semi-abstract pictorial values of the city: fore-
shortened viewpoints, patterns of mass and line, the contrast of
sunlight and shadow. The result, as the director himself said, 'was
not a film of human beings, but of skyscrapers which they had
erected, completely dwarfing humanity itself.

What particularly appealed to Flaherty was the opportunity to
use telephoto lenses. Fascinated by the longer focus lens he made
shots from the top of nearly every skyscraper in Manhattan. 'I
shot New York buildings from the East River bridges, from the
ferries and from the Jersey shore looking up to the peaks of Man-
hattan. The effects obtained with my long focus lenses amazed
me. I remember shooting from the roof of the Telephone Building
across the Jersey shore with an eight-inch lens and, even at that
distance, obtaining stereoscopic effect that seemed magical. It
was like drawing a veil from the beyond, revealing life scarcely
visible to the naked eye.'

Despite the uniqueness of the film and Flaherty's reputation,
24 Dollar Island had a restricted and abortive release. It9 hand-
ling at New York's largest theatre, The Roxy, foreshadowed
somewhat the later vandalism to be practised by others upon
Eisenstein's Romance Sentimentale and Que Viva Mexico. After
cutting down the 24 Dollar Island from two reels to one, the Roxy
directors used the picture as a background projection for one of
their lavish stage dance routines called The Sideivalks of New
York.

Outside of these two early efforts the main current of American
experimental films began to appear in 1928. The first ones showed
the influence of the expressionistic style of the German film, The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Expressionism not only appealed to the
ideological mood of the time, but suited the technical resources
of the motion picture novitiates as well. Lack of money and
experience had to be offset by ingenuity and fearlessness. 'Effects'

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

became the chief goal. The camera and its devices, the setting,
and any object at hand that could be manipulated for an effect
were exploited toward achieving a striking expression. Native
experimenters emphasized technique above everything else.
Content was secondary or so neglected as to become the merest
statement. One of the first serious motion picture critics, Gilbert
Seldes, writing in the New Republic March 6th, 1929, pointed out,
'the experimental film-makers are opposed to naturalism; they
have no stars; they are over-influenced by Caligari; they want to
give their complete picture without the aid of any medium except
the camera and projector'.

The first experimental film in this country to show the influence
of the expressionistic technique was the one reel The Life and
Death of 9413 — A Hollywood Extra. Made in the early part of
1928, this film cost less than a hundred dollars and aroused so
much interest and discussion that Film Booking Office, a major
distribution agency, contracted to distribute it through their
exchanges, booking it into seven hundred theatres here and
abroad.

A Hollywood Extra (they shortened its title) was written and
directed by Robert Florey, a former European film journalist and
assistant director, and Slavko Vorkapich, a painter with an
intense desire to make poetic films. In addition, Vorkapich also
designed, photographed and edited the picture. The close-ups,
however, were shot by Gregg Toland, today one of Hollywood's
outstanding cameramen. Most of the film was produced at night
in Vorkapich's kitchen out of odds and ends — paper cubes,
cigar boxes, tin cans, moving and reflected lights (from a single
four-hundred-watt bulb), an erector set, cardboard figures — and
a great deal of ingenuity. Its style, broad and impressionistic,
disclosed a remarkable flair and resourcefulness in the use of
props, painting, camera and editing.

The story of A Hollywood Extra was a simple satirical fantasy
highlighting the dreams of glory of a Mr. Jones, a would-be star.
A letter of recommendation gets Mr. Jones to a Hollywood casting
director. There Mr. Jones is changed from an individual into a
number — 9413, which is placed in bold ciphers upon his forehead.
Thereafter he begins to talk the jibberish of Hollywood consisting
of slight variations of 4bah-bah-bah-bah . . .'

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

Meanwhile handsome number 15, formerly Mr. Blank, is being
screen-tested for a feature part. He pronounces 'bah-bah-bah'
facing front, profile left, profile right. The executives approve of
him with enthusiastic 'bah-bahs'.

Subsequently the preview of number 15's picture is a great
success. A star is painted on his forehead and his 'bah-bahV
become assertive and haughty.

But number 9413 is less fortunate. In his strenuous attempt to
climb the stairway to success the only recognition he receives is
'nbah-nbah-nbah' — no casting today. From visions of heavy
bankrolls, nightclubs, glamour and fanfare, his dreams shrink to:
'Pork and Beans — 15c'.

Clutching the telephone out of which issue the repeated 'nbahs'
of the casting director, number 9413 sinks to the floor and dies of
starvation. But the picture ends on a happy note (6as all Holly-
wood pictures must end'). Number 9413 ascends to heaven. There
an angel wipes the number off his forehead and he becomes
human again.

Something of the film's quality can be seen in the description
by Herman Weinberg (Movie Makers, January, 1929): 'The
hysteria and excitement centring around an opening night per-
formance . . . was quickly shown by photographing a skyscraper
(cardboard miniatures) with an extremely mobile camera, swing-
ing it up and down, and from side to side, past a battery of hissing
arc lights, over the theatre facade and down to the arriving motor
vehicles. To portray the mental anguish of the extra, Florey and
Vorkapich cut grotesque strips of paper into the shape of gnarled,
malignant looking trees, silhouetted them against a background
made up of moving shadows and set them in motion with an
electric fan.'

Following A Hollywood Extra Robert Florey made two other
experimental fantasies: The Loves of Zero and Johann the Coffin
Maker, Both films, also produced at a minimum cost, employed
the stylized backgrounds, costumes and acting derived from
Caligari.

The Loves of Zero was the better of the two, with a number of
shots quite fanciful and inventive. Noteworthy were the split-
screen close-ups of Zero showing his face split into two different
sized parts, and the multiple exposure views of Machine Street,

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

the upper portion of the screen full of revolving machinery
dominating the lower portion showing the tiny figure of Zero
walking home.

Despite their shortcomings and even though they flagrantly
reflected German expressionism, these first attempts at experi-
ment were significant. Their low cost, their high inventive
potential, their elimination of studio crafts and personnel, vividly
brought home the fact that the medium was within anyone's
reach and capabilities. One did not have to spend a fortune or be
a European or Hollywood 'genius' to explore the artistic possi-
bilities of movie -making.

Appearing about the same time, but more ambitious in scope,
was the six reel experimental film, The Last Moment. Produced in
'sympathetic collaboration by Paul Fejos director, Leon Shamroy
cameraman, and Otto Matiesen the leading actor', this picture,
also non-studio made, was saturated with artifices and effects
gleaned from a careful study of the decor, lighting, and camera
treatment in Waxworks, Variety and The Last Laugh. Made up of
innumerable brief, kaleidoscopic scenes, it was a vigorous mani-
festation of the expressionistic style.

The story was 'a study in subjectivity' based on the theory that
at a moment of crisis before a person loses consciousness, he
may see a panorama of pictures summarizing the memories of a
lifetime. The film opens with a shot of troubled water. A strug-
gling figure and a hand reach up, 'as if in entreaty'. A man is
drowning. This is followed by a rapid sequence of shots: the head
of a Pierrot, faces of women, flashing headlights, spinning wheels,
a star shower, an explosion which climaxes in a shot of a child's
picture book.

From the book, the camera flashes back to summarize the
drowning man's life. Impressions of schooldays, a fond mother,
an unsympathetic father, a birthday party, reading Shakespeare,
a first visit to the theatre, the boy scrawling love notes, an
adolescent affair with a carnival dancer, quarrelling at home,
leaving for the city, stowing away on a ship, manhandled by a
drunken captain, stumbling into a tavern, acting to amuse a circle
of revellers, reeling in drunken stupor and run over by a car,
attended by a sympathetic nurse, winning a reputation as an actor,
marrying, quarrelling, divorcing, gambling, acting, attending his

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mother's funeral, enlisting in the army, the battlefront. No
attempt was made to probe into these actions but to give them as
a series of narrative impressions.

The concluding portions of the film were likewise told in the
same impressionistic manner. The soldier returns to civilian life
and resumes his acting career, falls in love with his leading lady,
marries her, is informed of her accidental death, becomes dis-
traught, finally is impelled to suicide. Wearing his Pierrot cos-
tume, the actor wades out into the lake at night.

Now the camera repeats the opening summary: the troubled
waters, the faces, the lights, the wheels, the star shower, the
explosion. The outstretched hand gradually sinks from view. A
few bubbles rise to the surface. The film ends.

In many respects the story proved superficial and melodramatic
with moments of bathos. But these faults were overcome by
freshness of treatment and an outstanding conception and tech-
nique which made the film a singular and arresting experiment.

The camerawork of Leon Shamroy, then an unknown American
photographer, was compared favourably with the best of the
European camera stylists. ''The Last Moment is composed of a
series of camera tricks, camera angles, and various motion picture
devices which for completeness and novelty have never before
been equalled upon the screen', wrote Tamar Lane in the Film
Mercury, November 11th, 1927. 'Such remarkable camerawork
is achieved here as has never been surpassed: German films in-
cluded', claimed Irene Thirer in the New York Daily News, March
12th, 1928.

But The Last Moment had more than just camera superiority.
For America it was a radical departure in structure, deliberately
ignoring dramatic conventions of story-telling and striving for a
cinematic form of narrative. Instead of subduing the camera and
using the instrument solely as a recording device, the director
boldly emphasized the camera's role and utilized all of its
narrative devices. The significant use of dissolves, multiple
exposures, irises, mobility, split screen, created a style which
though indebted to the Germans, was better integrated in terms
of visual movement and rhythm and overshadowed the shallow-
ness of the picture's content.

Exhibited in many theatres throughout the country, The Last

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Moment aroused more widespread critical attention than any
American picture of the year. Most of it was favourable as that of
John S. Cohen, Jr., in the New York Sun, March 3, 1928: 'One of
the most stimulating experiments in movie history . . . The Last
Moment is a remarkable cinema projection of an arresting idea —
and almost worthy of the misused designation of being a land-
mark in movie history.'

More eclectic than previous American experiments was The
Tell- Tale Heart, directed by Charles Klein. This picture set out to
capture the horror and insanity of Poe's story in a manner that
was boldly imitative of Caligari. Like the German film, the
foundation of the American's style lay in its decor. Angular flats,
painted shadows, oblique windows and doors, and zigzag designs
distorted perspective and increased the sense of space. But
opposed to the expressionistic architecture were the early
nineteenth-century costumes, the realistic acting, and the lighting
sometimes realistic, sometimes stylized.

Although poorly integrated and lacking the distinctive style of
Caligari, The Tell-Tale Heart had flavour. Even borrowed ideas
and rhetorical effects were a refreshing experience and the use of
a Poe story in itself was novel. Moreover, the general level of
production was of such a professional standard that Clifford
Howard in Close Up, August 1928, stated: 'The Tell-Tale Heart is
perhaps the most finished production of its kind that has yet
come out of Hollywood proper.'

Shortly after The Tell-Tale Heart a second film based on Poe
appeared, The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe's stories were to
appeal more and more to the experimental and amateur film-
makers. Poe's stories were not only short and in public domain,
but depended more upon atmosphere and setting than upon
characterization. What particularly kindled the imagination of
the experimenter was the haunting, evocative atmosphere which
brought to mind similar values in memorable German pictures
which h'ke Caligari had made a deep impression. Even to noviti-
ates, Poe's writing was so obviously visual, they seemed almost
made to order for the imaginative cameraman and designer.

The Fall of the House of Usher was directed and photographed
by James Sibley Watson, with continuity and setting by Melville
Webber. Almost a year in the making although only two reels in

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length, the production strove to make the spectator feel whatever
'was grotesque, strange, fearful and morbid in Poe's work'.

Unlike the previous 'Caligarized' Poe story, The Fall of the
House of Usher displayed an original approach to its material and
an imaginative and intense use of the means of expressionism
which gave the picture a distinctive quality, different from any
experimental film of the day. From the very opening — a horseman
descending a plain obscured by white puffs of smoke — mystery
and unreality descend. Surprising imagery, sinister and startling,
follow one upon the other. A dinner is served by disembodied
hands in black rubber gloves. The cover of a dish is removed
before one of the diners and on it is revealed the symbol of death.
The visitor to the house of Usher loses his entity and becomes a
hat, bouncing rather miserably around, 'an intruder made un-
comfortable by singular events that a hat might understand as
well as a man'.

The climax — the collapse of the house of Usher — is touched
with grandeur and nightmarish terror. Lady Usher emerges from
her incarceration with the dust of decay upon her, toiling up end-
less stairs from the tomb where she had been buried alive, and
topples over the demented body of her brother. Then in a kind of
visual metaphor the form of the sister covering the brother
'crumbles and disintegrates like the stones of the house and
mingles with its ashy particles in utter annihilation', wrote
Shelley Hamilton in the National Board of Review Magazine,
January 1929.

The distinctive style of the picture was achieved by an in-
dividual technique which showed an assimilation of Destiny,
Nibelungen and Waxworks. The various influences, however, were
never literally followed but were integrated with the film-makers'
own feeling and imagination so that a new form emerged.
Watson's and Webber's contribution consisted in the use of light
on wall board instead of painted sets, and optical distortion
through prisms and a unique use of multiple exposure and
dissolves to create atmospheric effects that were neither realistic
nor stylized yet had the qualities of both. Characters were also
given this visual transformation and made to seem shadowy, al-
most phantom-like, moving in a tenuous world of spectral sur-
roundings. The entire film was saturated in a gelatinous quality

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that rendered the unreal and evocative mood of Poe's story with
a corresponding vivid unreality.

Unfortunately the picture was marred by amateurish acting,
ineffective stylized make-up and gestures. Nevertheless it was an
outstanding and important independent effort, acclaimed by
Harry Alan Potamkin in Close Up, December 1929, as 'an ex-
cellent achievement in physical materials'.

In sharp opposition to the expressionistic approach and treat-
ment was the work of another group of experimenters who
appeared at this time. These film-makers looked for inspiration to
the French films of Clair, Feyder, Cavalcanti, Leger and Deslaw.
Their approach was direct, their treatment naturalistic.

Perhaps the foremost practitioner in this field because of his
work in still photography, was Ralph Steiner the New York
photographer. Almost ascetic in his repudiation of everything
that might be called a device or stunt, his pictures were devoid of
'multiple exposures, use of the negative, distortion, truncation by
angle, etc.', for the reason he stated, 'that simple content of the
cinema medium has been far from conclusively exploited'.

Here was a working creed which deliberately limited itself to
avoid effects in order to concentrate on subject-matter. H20
(1929), Surf and Seaweed (1930), Mechanical Principles (1930),
were produced with the straightforward vision and economy of
means that characterized the film-maker's still photography. Yet
curiously enough these pictures despite their 'straight photo-
graphy' gave less evidence of concern for content than, say, The
Fall of the House of Usher which employed all the 'tricks' of
cinema. As a matter of fact the content in these Steiner films was
hardly of any importance, certainly without social or human
values and offered solely as a means of showing an ordinary object
in a fresh way. Limited to this visual experience, the films' chief
interest lay in honest and skilled photography and decorative
appeal.

Steiner's first effort, H 2 0, was a study of reflections on water
and won the $500 Photoplay award for the best amateur film of
1929. 'I was interested in seeing how much material could be
gotten by trying to see water in a new way,' Steiner said, 'rather
than by doing things to it with the camera.' Yet to get the water
reflections enlarged and abstract patterns of shadows, Steiner

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shot much of the film with six-and twelve-inch lenses. While it was
literally true nothing was done to the water with the camera, it
was also true that if Steiner had not used large focus lenses, he
would not have seen the water in a new way. (The point is a
quibbling one, for devices like words are determined by their
associations in a unity. A device that may be integral to one film
may be an affectation in another.) H20 proved to be a series of
smooth and lustrous abstract moving patterns of light and shade,
'so amazingly effective' wrote Alexander Bakshy in the Nation,
April 1st., 1931, 'that it made up for the lack of dynamic unity in
the picture as a whole'.

Surf and Seaweed captured the restless movement of surf, tides
and weeds with the same sharpness and precision of camerawork.
Mechanical Principles portrayed the small demonstration models
of gears, shafts and eccentrics in action, at one point evoking a
sort of whimsical humour by the comic antics of a shaft which
kept 'grasping a helpless bolt by the head'.

Essentially all three films were abstractions. Their concentrated
close-up style of photography, made for an intensity and pictorial
unity which was still novel. They represented sort of refined,
streamlined versions of Ballet Mecanique (although without that
historic film's percussive impact or dynamic treatment), and
proved striking additions to the growing roster of American
experimental works.

Another devotee of French films, Lewis Jacobs, together with
Jo Gercon and Hershell Louis, all of Philadelphia, made a short
experiment in 1930 called Mobile Composition. Although abstract
in title, the film was realistic, the story of a developing love affair
of a boy and girl who are thrust together for half an hour in a
friend's studio.

The psychological treatment stemmed from the technique used
by Feyder in Therese Raquin. Significant details, contrast lighting,
double exposures, large close-ups, depicted the growing strain
between disturbed emotions. In one of the scenes where the boy
and girl are dancing together, the camera assumed a subjective
viewpoint and showed the spinning walls and moving objects of
the studio as seen by the boy, emphasizing a specific statuette to
suggest the boy's inner disturbance.

Later this scene, cut to a dance rhythm, provoked Jo Gercon

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and Hershell Louis to do an entire film from a subjective view-
point in an attempt at 'intensiveness as against progression'. The
same story line was used, but instead of photographing the action
of the boy and girl, the camera showed who they were, where they
went, what they saw and did solely by objects. That film was
called The Story of a Nobody (1930).

The film's structure was based on the sonata form in music,
divided into three movements, the mutations of tempo in each
movement moderately quick, slow, very quick — captioned in
analogy to music. It used freely such cinematic devices as the
split screen, multiple exposures, masks, different camera speeds,
mobile camera, reverse motion, etc. In one scene a telephone fills
the centre of the screen, on either side counter images which make
up the subject of the telephone conversation, alternate. The
spectator knows what the boy and girl are talking about without
ever seeing or hearing them. 'Motion within the screen as differing
from motion across the screen' pointed out Harry Alan Potamkin,
Close Up, February 1930. 'the most important American film I
have seen since my return [from Europe]'.

As American experimenters grew more familiar with their
medium and as the time spirit changed, they turned farther away
from the expressionism of the Germans and the naturalism of the
French, to the heightened realism of the Russians. The impact of
the latter film and their artistic credo summed up in the word
'montage' was so shattering that it wiped out the aesthetic stand-
ards of its predecessors and ushered in new criteria. The principle
of montage as displayed in the works and writings of Eisenstein,
Pudovkin and especially Vertov, became by 1931 the aesthetic
goals for most experimental film-makers in the United States.

Among the first films to show the influence of Soviet technique
was a short made by Charles Vidor called The Spy (1931-32),
adapted from the Ambrose Bierce story, An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge. The Spy, like The Last Moment, revealed the
thoughts of a dying man. But unlike the earlier film which used a
flashback technique, The Spy used a flash-forward treatment. It
did not depict the events of a past life, but the thoughts of the
immediate present, given in such a manner that the spectator was
led to believe that what he saw was actually taking place in
reality instead of only in the condemned man's mind.

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The picture opens with the 6py (Nicholas Bela) walking be-
tween the ranks of a firing squad. Everything seems quite casual,
except for a slight tenseness in the face of the spy. We see the
preparations for the hanging. A bayonet is driven into the
masonry, the rope is fastened, the command is given, the drums
begin to roll, the commanding officer orders the drummer boy to
turn his face away from the scene, the noose is placed, the victim
climbs on to the bridge parapet. Now the drum beats are intercut
with the spy's beating chest. Suddenly there is a shot of a mother
and child. At this point the unexpected occurs. The noose seems
to break, the condemned man falls into the river. He quickly
recovers and begins to swim away in an effort to escape. The
soldiers go after him, shooting and missing, pursuing him through
the woods until it appears the spy has escaped. At the moment of
realization that he is free, the film cuts back to the bridge. The
spy is suspended from the parapet where he had been hanged. He
is dead.

The escape was only a flash-forward of a dying man's last
thoughts, a kind of wish fulfilment. The conclusion, true to
Bierce's theme, offered a grim touch of irony.

In style The Spy was highly realistic. There were no camera
tricks, no effects. The actors, non-professional, used no make-up.
Sets were not painted flats or studio backgrounds but actual
locations. The impact depended entirely upon straightforward
cutting and mounting and showed that the director had a deep
regard for Soviet technique.

Other experimental films in these years derived from the
theories of Dziga Vertov and his Kino-Eye productions. Ve~tov's
advocation of pictures without professional actors, without
stories, and without artificial scenery, had great appeal to the
numerous independent film-makers who lacked experience with
actors and story construction. These experimenters eagerly em-
braced the Russian's manifesto which said: 'the news film is the
foundation of film art'. The camera must surprise life. Pictures
should not be composed chronologically or dramatically, but
thematically. They should be based on such themes as work, play,
sports, rest and other manifestations of daily life.

The pursuit of Vertov's dogmas led to a flock of 'cine poems'
and 'city symphonies'. Notable efforts in this direction included

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John Hoffman's Prelude to Spring, Herman Weinburg's Autumn
Fire and City Symphony, Emlen Etting's Oramunde and Laureate,
Irving Browning's City of Contrasts, Jay Leyda's Bronx Morning,
Leslie Thatcher's Another Day, Seymour Stern's Land of the Sun,
Lynn Riggs' A Day in Santa Fe, Mike Seibert's Breakwater,
Henwar Rodakiewicz's The Barge, Portrait of a Young Man, and
Faces of New England, Lewis Jacobs' Footnote to Fact.

These films were mainly factual — descriptive of persons, places
and activities, or emphasizing human interest and ideas. Some
were commentaries. All strove for perfection of visual values.
Photography was carefully composed and filtered. Images were
cut for tempo and rhythm and arranged in thematic order.

Other films strove to compose 'sagacious pictorial comments'
in a more satirical vein on a number of current topics. Mr. Motor-
boat's Last Stand, by John Flory and Theodore Huff, which won
the amateur Cinema League award for 1933, was a comedy of the
depression. In a mixed style of realism and fantasy it told a story
of an unemployed Negro (Leonard Motorboat Stirrup) who lives
in an automobile graveyard and sells apples on a nearby street
corner. Being an imaginative sort, Mr. Motorboat pretends he
rides to work in what was once an elegant car, but which now
stands battered and wheelless and serves as his home. The fantasy
proceeds with Mr. Motorboat making a sum of money which he
then uses as bait (literally and figuratively) to fish in Wall Street.
Soon he becomes phenomenally rich only to lose suddenly every-
thing in the financial collapse. With the eruption of his prosperity
he awakens from his fantasy to discover that his apple stand has
been smashed by a competitor. Called 'the best experimental film
of the year' by Movie Makers (December, 1933), the picture was a
neat achievement in photography, cutting and social criticism.

Another commentary on contemporary conditions was Pie in
the Sky, by Elia Kazan, Molly Day Thatcher, Irving Lerner, and
Ralph Steiner. Improvisation was the motivating element in this
experiment which sought to point out that though things may
not be right in this world, they would in the next.

The people responsible for Pie in the Sky — filmically and socially
alert — chose a city dump as a source of inspiration. There they
discovered the remains of a Christmas celebration: a mangy tree,
several almost petrified holly-wreaths, broken whiskey bottles

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and some rather 'germy gadgets'. The Group-Theatre-trained
Elia Kazan began to improvise. The tree evoked memories of his
early Greek orthodox ceremonial. The other members of the
group 'caught on', extracting from the rubbish piles a seductive
dressmaker's dummy, a collapsible baby-tub, some metal castings
that served as haloes, the wrecked remains of a car, and a worn-out
sign which read: 'Welfare Dept'. With these objects they reacted
to Kazan's improvisation and developed a situation on the theme
that everything was going to be 'hunky-dory' in the hereafter.

Pie in the Sky was not totally successful. Its improvisational
method accounted for both its weakness and strength. Structur-
ally and thematically it was shaky; yet its impact was fresh and at
moments extraordinary. Its real value lay in the fact that it
opened up a novel method of film-making with wide possibilities
which unfortunately has not been explored since.

Two other experiments sought to make amusing pointed state-
ments by a cunning use of montage. Commercial Medley, by Lewis
Jacobs, poked fun at Hollywood's 'Coming Attractions' advertise-
ments and their penchant for exaggeration, by a juxtaposition
and mounting of current 'trailers'. Even as You and I, by Roger
Barlow, Le Roy Robbins and Harry Hay was an extravagant
burlesque on surrealism.

Just when montage as a theory of film-making was becoming
firmly established, it was suddenly challenged by the invention of
sound pictures. Experimental film-makers as all others were thrown
into confusion. Endless controversy raged around whether montage
was finished, whether sound was a genuine contribution to film
art, whether sound was merely a commercial expedient to bolster
fallen box office receipts, whether sound would soon disappear.

Strangely enough, at first most experimental film workers were
against sound. They felt lost, let down. The core of their dis-
approval lay in a fear and uncertainty of the changes the addition
of the new element would make. Artistically talking pictures
seemed to upset whatever montage theories they had learned.
Practically the greatly increased cost of sound forced most ex-
perimenters to give up their cinematic activity.

There were some, however, who quickly displayed a sensitive
adjustment to this new aural element. The first and probably the
most distinguished experimental sound film of the period was Lot

128

28. Fireworks
(Kenneth Anger, U.S.A., 1947)

29. Footnote to Fact
(Lewis Jacobs, U.S.A.)

30. Introspection
(Sara Arledge, U.S.A.)

31. Potted Psalm

(Sidney Peterson and James
Broughton, U.S.A., 1947)

32. Dreams that Money

Can Buy:

Narcissus Sequence

(Hans Richter, U.S.A.,

1947)

33. Lot and Sodom

J. S. Watson and Melville Webber,
U.S.A., 1933-4)

34. House of Cards
(Joseph Vogel, U.S.A., 1947)

AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

and Sodom (1933-34) made by Watson and Webber, the producers
of The Fall of the House of Usher. It told the Old Testament story
of 'that wicked city of the plain, upon which God sent destruction
and the saving of God's man Lot', almost completely in terms of
homo-sexuality and the subconscious. The directions avoided
literal statement and relied upon a rhythmical arrangement of
symbols rather than upon chronological reconstruction of events.
The picture proved to be a scintillating study of sensual pleasure
and corruption, full of subtle imagery. A specially composed score
by Louis Siegel welded music closely and logically into the story's
emotional values.

Lot and Sodom used a technique similar to that of The Fall of
the House of Usher, but it was far more skilfully controlled and
resourcefully integrated. It drew upon all the means of camera,
lenses, multiple exposure, distortions, dissolves and editing to
achieve a beauty of mobile images, of dazzling light and shade, of
melting rhythms, with an intensity of feeling that approached
poetry. Its brilliant array of diaphanous shots and scenes — smok-
ing plains, undulating curtains, waving candle flames, glistening
flowers, voluptuous faces, sensual bodies, frenzied orgies — were so
smoothly synthesized on the screen that the elements of each
composition seemed to melt and flow into each other with extra-
ordinary iridescence.

Outstanding for its splendour and intense poetic expression was
the sequence of the daughter's pregnancy and birth. I quote from
Herman Weinberg's eloquent review in Close Up, September
1933: 'I cannot impart how the sudden burst of buds to recall full
bloom, disclosing the poignantly lyrical beauty of their stamens,
as Lot's daughter lets drop her robe disclosing her naked loveli-
ness, gets across so well the idea of reproduction. Her body floats
in turbulent water during her travail, everything is immersed in
rushing water until it calms down, the body rises above the gentle
ripples, and now the water drops gently (in slow motion — three
quarters of the film seems to have been shot in slow motion) from
the fingers. A child is born.'

Suffused with dignity, serenity and majesty, this sequence can
only be compared to the magnificent night passages in Dov-
zhenko's Soil. Like that Soviet film, the American was a luminous
contribution to the realm of lyric cinema.

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The second experimental sound film of note was Dawn to Dawn
(1934), directed by Joseph Berne, the script written by Seymour
Stern. Its story was reminiscent of the work of Sherwood Ander-
son. A lonesome girl lives on an isolated farm, seeing no one but
her father, brutalized by poverty and illness. One day, into the
house comes a wandering farm hand applying for a job. During
the afternoon the girl and the farm hand fall in love and plan to
leave together the next morning. That night, the father, sensing
what has happened and afraid to lose his daughter, drives the
farm hand off the property. At dawn, the father has a stroke and
dies. The girl is left more alone than ever.

The subject was different from the usual experimental film as it
was from the sunshine and sugar romances of the commercial
cinema. What it offered was sincerity instead of synthetic
emotion. The actors wore no make up. The girl (Julie Haydon,
later to become a star) was a farm girl with neither artificial eye
lashes, painted lips, glistening nails nor picturesque smudges. All
the drabness and pastoral beauty of farm life was photographed
by actually going to a farm. There was an honesty of treatment,
of detail and texture, far above the usual picture-postcard de-
pictions. The musical score by Cameron McPherson, producer of
the film, used Debussy-like passages to 'corroborate both the
pastoral and erotic qualities' of the story.

The picture was weakest in dialogue. This was neither well
written nor well spoken and seemed quite at odds with the photo-
graphic realism of the film. Yet despite this Dawn to Dawn dis-
played such a real feeling for the subject and medium that it
moved Eric Knight, critic for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, to
write: 'I am tempted to call Dawn to Dawn one of the most
remarkable attempts in independent cinematography in America'
(March 18, 1936).

Other films continued to be made, but only two used sound.
Broken Earth, by Roman Freulich and Clarence Muse, combined
music and song in a glorification of the 'spiritually minded negro'.
Underground Printer, directed by Thomas Bouchard, photo-
graphed by Lewis Jacobs, presented a political satire in a 'mono-
dance' drama featuring the dancer John Bovingdon, utilizing
speech, sound effects and stylized movements.

Two other silent films appeared, Synchronization, by Joseph

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

Schillinger and Lewis Jacobs, with drawings by Mary Ellen Bute,
illustrated the principles of rhythm in motion. Olivera Street by
Mike Seibert was a tense dramatization of the aftermath of a
flirtation between two Spanish street vendors. Of high calibre,
this picture deserved far more attention and exhibition than it
ever received.

By 1935 the economic depression was so widespread that all
efforts at artistic experiment seemed pointless. Interest centred
now on social conditions. A new kind of film-making took hold:
the documentary. Under dire economic distress aesthetic rebellion
gave way to social rebellion. Practically all the former experi-
mental film-makers were absorbed in the American documentary
film movement which rapidly became a potent force in motion
picture progress.

One team continued to make pictures under the old credo but
with the addition of sound — Mary Ellen Bute designer and Ted
Nemeth cameraman. These two welded light, colour, movement
and music into abstract films which they called 'Visual symphon-
ies'. Their aim was to 'bring to the eyes a combination of visual
forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhyth-
mic cadences of music.'

Their films, three in black and white: Anitrcfs Dance (1936),
Evening Star (1937), Parabola (1938), and three in colour: Toccata
and Fugue (1940), Tarantella (1941) and Sport Spools (1941), were
all composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-
changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening
colours and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the
musical accompaniment. Their compositions were synchronized —
sound and image following a chromatic scale, or divided into two
themes — visuals and aurals developing in counterpoint.

At first glance the Bute— Nemeth pictures seemed like an echo
of the ex-German pioneer, Oscar Fischinger — one of the first to
experiment with the problems of abstract motion and sound.
Actually they were variations on Fischinger's method, but less
rigid in their patterns and choice of objects, more tactile in their
forms, more sensuous in their use of light and colour rhythms,
more concerned with the problems of deep space, more concerned
with music complimenting rather than corresponding to the
visuals.

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AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

The difference in quality between the Bute— Nemeth pictures
and Fischinger's came largely from a difference in technique.
Fischinger worked with two-dimensional animated drawings ;
Bute— Nemeth used any three-dimensional substance at hand:
ping-pong balls, paper cut-outs, sculptured models, cellophane,
rhinestones, buttons, all the odds and ends picked up at the five
and ten cent store. Fischinger used flat lighting on flat surfaces;
Bute— Nemeth employed ingenious lighting and camera effects by
shooting through long-focus lenses, prisms, distorting mirrors, ice
cubes, etc. Both film-makers utilized a schematic process of com-
position. The ex-German worked out his own method. The
Americans used Schillinger's mathematical system of composition
as the basis for the visual and aural continuity and their inter-
relationship.

Strangely beautiful in pictorial effects and with surprising
rhythmic patterns, the Bute— Nemeth 'visual symphonies' often
included as well elements of theatrical power such as comedy,
suspense, pathos and drama in the action of the objects which
lifted them above the usual abstract films, and made them en-
grossing experiments in a new experience.

When America entered the war, the experimental film went
into limbo. But with the war's end, a sharp and unexpected out-
burst of concern and activity in experimental movies broke forth
in all parts of the United States. Behind this phenomenal post-
war revival were two forces which had been set in motion during
the war years. The first was the circulation at a nominal cost to
non-profit groups of programmes from the film library of the
Museum of Modern Art. Their collection of pictures and pro-
gramme notes dealing with the history, art and traditions of
cinema went to hundreds of colleges, universities, museums, film
appreciation groups, study groups. These widespread exhibitions
as well as the Museum of Modern Art's own showings in their
theatre in New York City, exerted a major influence in preparing
the way for a broader appreciation and production of experi-
mental films.

The second force was the entirely new and enlarged status and
prestige the film acquired in the service of the war effort. New
vast audiences saw ideological, documentary, educational and
training subjects for the first time and developed a taste for

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experimental and non-commercial techniques. Moreover, thou-
sands of film-makers were developed in the various branches of
service. Many of these learned to handle motion picture and
sound apparatus and have begun to use their instruments to seek
out, on their own, the artistic potentialities of the medium through
experiment.

As an offshoot of these two forces, groups have appeared in
various parts of the country fostering art in cinema. One of the
most active is that headed by Frank Stauffacher and Richard
Foster in San Francisco. With the assistance of the staff of the
San Francisco Museum of Art they were actually the first in this
country to assemble, document and exhibit a series of strictly
avant-garde film showings on a large scale. The spirited response
resulted in the publication of a symposium on the art of avant-
garde films, together with programme notes and references called
Art in Cinema. This book, a non-profit publication, is a notable
contribution to the growing body of serious film literature in this
country.

Among others advancing the cause of experimental films are
Paul Ballard who organized innumerable avant-garde film show-
ings throughout Southern California, the Creative Film Associates
and The Peoples' Educational Centre, both of Los Angeles and
equally energetic on behalf of creative cinema.

To Maya Deren goes the credit of being the first since the war to
inject a fresh note in experimental film production. Her pictures
— four to date — all short, all silent, all in black and white — have
been consistently individual and striking. Moreover, she has the
organizational ability to see to it that film groups, museums,
schools, and little theatres see her efforts, and the writing skill
to express her ideas and credos in magazine articles, books, and
pamphlets which are well circularized. Therefore today she is one
of the better known experimenters.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Maya Deren's first picture, was
made in collaboration with Alexander Hammid (co-director with
Herbert Kline of the documentary films: Crisis, Lights out in
Europe, and Forgotten Village). This film attempted to show the
way in which an individual's subconscious will develop an appar-
ently simple and casual occurrence into a critical emotional
experience. A girl (acted by Miss Deren herself) comes home one

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afternoon and falls asleep. She then sees herself in a dream
returning home, is tortured by loneliness and frustrations and
impulsively commits suicide. The climax of the story has a double
ending in which it appears that the imagined — the dream — has
become the real.

The film utilizes non actors — Miss Deren and Alexander
Hammid, and the setting is their actual home. The photography
is straight, objective, although the intent is to evoke a subjective
mood. In this respect it is not completely successful. It skips from
objectivity to subjectivity without transitions or preparation and
is often confusing. But the cutting, the use of camera angles, the
feeling for pace and movement are realized with sensitivity and
cinematic awareness. Despite some symbols borrowed from
Cocteau's Blood of a Poet the picture demonstrates a unique gift
for the medium that is quite unusual for a first effort.

At Land (1944), her second effort, starts at a lonely beach
where the waves moving in reverse deposit a sleeping girl (Miss
Deren) who slowly awakens, climbs a dead tree trunk — her face
innocent and expectant as though she was seeing the world for the
first time — arriving at a banquet. There, completely ignored by
the diners, she crawls along the length of the dining table to a
chess game, snatches the queen and sees it fall into a hole. She
then follows it down a precipitous slope to a rock formation where
the queen is washed away to sea.

Writing about her intention in this film, Miss Deren said, 4It
presents a relativistic universe ... in which the problems of the
individual as the sole continuous element, is to relate herself to a
fluid, apparently incoherent, universe. It is in a sense a mytho-
logical voyage of the twentieth century'.

Fraught with complexities of ideas and symbols, the film's
major cinematic value lay in its fresh contiguities of shot relations
achieved through the technique of beginning a movement in one
place and concluding it in another. Thus real time and space were
destroyed. In its place was created a cinematic time and space
which enabled unrelated persons, places and objects to be related
and brought into harmony resulting in a new complexity of mean-
ing and form much in the same way as a poem might achieve its
effects through diverse associations or allegory.

The cinematic conception underlying At Land was further

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exploited and more simply pointed in a short film which followed:
A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945). The picture
featuring the dancer Talley Beatty opens with a slow circular pan
of a birch-tree forest. In the distance the figure of a dancer is
discovered, and while the camera continues its pan, the dancer is
seen again and again, but each time closer to the camera and in
successive stages of movement. Finally the dancer is revealed in
close-up and as he whirls away (still in the woods) there is a cut
on his movement which completes itself in the next shot as he
lands in the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Hall. There he
begins a pirouette, another cut and he completes the movement
in an apartment. Another leap, another cut and this time he con-
tinues the movement on a high cliff overlooking a river. The next
leap is done in close-up with the movement of actual flight carried
far beyond its natural length by slow motion, thus gaining the
effect of soaring inhumanly through space. This was not carried
out quite fully enough to achieve the complete effect but was an
exciting and stimulating demonstration of what could be done in
manipulating space and time and motion.

Dispensing with the formal limitations of actual space and time
which controls choreography for the stage, this film achieved a
new choreography arising from the temporal and spacial resources
of the camera and the cutting process. It was a new kind of film-
dance, indigenous to the medium and novel to the screen. John
Martin, dance critic for The New York Times, called it, 'the
beginnings of a virtually new art of "chorecinema" in which the
dance and the camera collaborate on the creation of a single new
work of art . . .'

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), Miss Deren's next effort,
illustrated in the words of the director, 4a critical metamorphosis
the changing of a widow into a bride. Its process, however, is not
narrative nor dramatic, but choreographic'. The attempt here too
was to create a dance film, not only out of filmic time and space
relations but also out of non-dance elements. Except for the two
leading performers, Rita Christiani and Frank Westbrook, none
of the performers were dancers, and save for a final sequence the
actual movements were not dance movements.

The dance quality was best expressed in the heart of the picture
— a party scene. The party was treated as a choreographic pattern

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of movements. Conversational pauses and gestures were elimin-
ated, leaving only a constantly moving group of smiling, socially
anxious people striving to reach one another, embrace one another,
or avoiding one another in a continuous ebb and flow of motion.

Miss Deren calls her picture a ritual. She bases the concept upon
the fact that, 'anthropologically speaking, a ritual is a form which
depersonalizes by use of masks, voluminous garments, group
movements, etc., and in so doing, fuses all elements into a trans-
cendant tribal power towards the achievement of some extra-
ordinary grace . . . usually reserved for . . . some inversion
towards life; the passage from sterile winter into fertile spring,
mortality into immortality, the child-son into the man-father'.

Such a change took place at the conclusion of the picture. After
a dance duet which culminated the party, one of the dancers,
whose role resembled that of a high priest, terrified the widow
when he changed from a man into a statue, then as she ran away
he became a man again pursuing her. Now the widow in the black
clothes seen at the opening, became by means of another cine-
matic device — the negative — a bride in a white bridal gown.
Upon a close-up of her metamorphosis the film abruptly ended.

In its intensity and complexity, Ritual in Transfigured Time is
an unusual and distinguished accomplishment, as well as a further
advance upon Miss Deren's previous uncommon efforts.

Less concerned with cinematic form and more with human
conflict are the pictures of Kenneth Anger. Escape Episode (1946)
begins with a boy and girl parting at the edge of the sea. As the
girl walks away she is watched by a woman from a plaster castle.
The castle turns out to be a spiritualists' temple, the woman a
medium and the girl's aunt. Both dominate and twist the girl's
life until she is in despair. Finally in a gesture of defiance the girl
invites the boy to the castle to sleep with her. The aunt informed
by spirits becomes enraged and threatens divine retribution. The
girl is frustrated, becomes bitter and resolves to escape.

The quality of the film is unique and shows an extreme sensi-
tivity to personal relationships. But because the thoughts, feelings
and ideas of the film-maker are superior to his command of the
medium, the effect is often fumbling and incomplete, with parts
superior to the whole.

Fireworks (1947), however, which deals with the neurosis of a

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homo-sexual, an *outcast' who dreams he is tracked down by-
some of his own minority group and brutally beaten, has none of
the uncertainties of Anger's other film. Here, despite 'forbidden'
subject-matter, the intensity of imagery, the strength and pre-
cision of shots and continuity are expressed with imagination and
daring honesty which on the screen is startling. Ordinary objects
— ornaments, a roman candle, a christmas tree — take on extra-
ordinary vitality when Anger uses them suddenly, arbitrarily,
almost with an explosive force as symbols of the neurosis which
spring from an 'ill-starred sense of the grandeur of catastrophe'.
The objectivity of the style captures the incipient erotic violence
and perversion with an agile camera, and becomes a frank and
deliberate expression of personality. Consequently the film has a
rare individuality which no literal summary of its qualities can
reproduce.

Closely related in spirit and technique to Anger's Fireworks is
Curtis Harrington's Fragment of Seeking (1946—47). This film has
for its theme the torture of adolescent self-love. A young man
(acted by the film-maker himself) troubled by the nature of his
narcissism, yet all the time curiously aware of the presence of
girls, is seen returning home. The long corridors, the courtyard
surrounded by walls, the cell-like room, suggest a prison. The
boy not quite understanding the agony of his desire, throws him-
self on his cot in despair. Suddenly he rouses himself to discover a
girl has entered his room. In a violent gesture of defiance, he
fiercely surrenders to her invitation. But at the moment of em-
bracing her he is struck forcibly by a revulsion. He pushes her
away only to discover that she is not a girl but a leering skeleton
with blonde tresses. He stares incredulously, then runs, or rather
whirls away in horror to another room where seeing himself, he is
made to face the realization of his own nature.

The film's structure has a singular simplicity. Unity and total-
ity of effect make it comparable to some of the stories by Poe.
Through overtones, suggestions, and relations between its images,
it expresses with complete clarity and forthrightness a critical
personal experience, leaving the spectator aroused and moved by
the revelation.

In the same vein but less concrete is The Potted Psalm (1947) by
Sidney Peterson and James Broughton. This picture is the result

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of a dozen scripts written over a period of three months during
actual shooting, each discarded for another, and of thousands of
feet of film which were eventually cut down to almost three reels
of 148 parts.

The ambiguity of the film's process is reflected on the screen.
What might have been an intense experience for the spectator
is merely reduced to an unresolved experiment for the film-
makers in a 'new method to resolve both myth and allegory'.
'The replacement of observation by intuition ... of analysis by
synthesis and of reality by symbolism', to quote the film-makers,
unfortunately results in an intellectualization to the point of
abstraction.

Pictorially the film is striking and stirs the imagination.
Structurally there is little cinematic cohesion. Shot after shot is
polished, arresting symbol, but there is insufficient inter-action,
and hardly any progression that adds up to organic form. As a
consequence the ornamental imagery, the 'field of dry grass to the
city, to the grave marked "mother" and made specific by the
accident of a crawling caterpillar, to the form of a spiral, thence
to a tattered palm and a bust of a male on a tomb', exciting as
they are in themselves, emerge in isolation as arabesques.

Like the films of Deren, Anger, and Harrington, The Potted
Psalm does not attempt fiction, but expresses a self-revelation.
Like those films it does it in a way still quite new to the medium.

In spite of minor technical faults, occasional lack of structural
incisiveness and an over- abundance of sexual symbols, this group
has moved away from the eclecticism of the pre-war experimental
film. Their films show little or no influence from the European
avant-garde. These film-makers are attempting to create out of
symbols, emotional images — -feeling images — and thus increase
the efficacy of film language itself. Strictly a fresh contribution, it
may be christened with a phrase taken from a quotation of Maya
Deren (New Directions No. 9, 1946), 'The great art expressions
will come later, as they always have; and they will be dedicated,
again, to the agony and experience rather than the incident'. The
'agony and experience film' sums up succinctly the work of this
group.

Fundamentally these films although executed under diverse
circumstances reveal many qualities in common. First as there

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should be, there is a real concern for the integrity of the film as a
whole. Then there is a unanimity of approach: an objective style
to portray a subjective conflict. There is no story or plot in the
conventional sense; no interest in locality as such — backgrounds
are placeless although manifestly the action of the films takes
place at a beach, in a house, a room, the countryside, or the
streets. For the most part the action is in the immediate present,
the now, with a great proportion of it taking place in the mind of
the chief character. They make use of the technique of dream
analysis not unlike some of the more advanced younger writers.

In the main the 'agony and experience' films constitute personal
statements exclusively concerned with the doings and feelings of
the film-makers themselves. In none of the films of this group does
the film-maker assume the omniscient attitude. The camera is
nearly always upon Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harring-
ton, or as in the case of the others, upon their filmic representatives
or symbols. Yet they are not specific individuals but special types
— abstractions or generalizations. And in becoming acquainted
with these types the spectator is introduced to an area bordering
on maladjustment.

Actually the problem of maladjustment is at the thematic core
of all the films in this group. Sometimes it takes the form of sex
morality and the conflict of adolescent self-love and homo-sexual-
ity; sometimes it takes the form of a racial or social neurosis. In
portraying these disturbances the film-makers are striving for an
extension of imaginative as well as objective reality that promises
a rich, new filmic development.

Another group of experimental film-makers since the war's end
is carrying on the non-objective school of abstract film design. To
this group the medium is not only an instrument, but an end in
itself. They seek to employ abstract images, colour and rhythm,
as an experience in itself apart from their power to express
thoughts or ideas. They are exclusively concerned with organizing
shapes, forms and colours in movement so related to each other that
out of their relationships comes an emotional experience. Their aim
is to manipulate images not for meaning but for plastic beauty.
They have their roots in the Eggeling-Richter- Ruttmann European
experiments of the early 'twenties which were the first attempts
to create relationships between plastic forms in movement.

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The most sophisticated and accomplished member of the non-
objective school is Oscar Fischinger, already referred to. Formerly
a disciple of Walter Ruttman — the outstanding pre-Hitler Ger-
man experimenter and a leader in the European avant-garde —
Fischinger in America for the past ten years has been working
steadily on the problems of design, movement, colour and sound.
Believing that 'the creative artist of the highest level always
works at his best alone', his aim has been 'to produce only for the
highest ideals — not thinking in terms of money or sensations or to
please the masses'.

In addition to making a sequence on Bach's Toccata and Fugue in
colour for Disney's Fantasia (eliminated from the final film as being
too abstract), Fischinger has made three other colour pictures in
this country: Allegretto, an abstraction to Jazz, Optical Poem to
Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody (for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
and An American March to Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever.

Fischinger calls his pictures 'absolute film studies'. All repre-
sent the flood of feeling created through music in visual, cine-
matic terms by colour and graphic design welded together in
patterns of rhythmic movement. Employing the simplest kind of
shapes — the square, the circle, the triangle — he manipulates them
along a curve of changing emotional patterns suggested by the
music and based upon the laws of musical form. By this means he
creates a unique structural form of his own in which can be sensed
rocket flights, subtly moulded curves, delicate gradations, as well
as tight, pure, classical shapeliness — all composed in complex
movement with myriad minute variations and with superb tech-
nical control. One of the few original film-makers, Fischinger's
pictures represent the first rank of cinematic expression in the
non-objective school.

Like Fischinger, John and James Whitney are keenly interested
in the problems of abstract colour, movement and sound. How-
ever, they feel that the image structure should dictate or inspire
the sound structure, or both should be reached simultaneously
and have a common creative origin. Therefore, instead of trans-
lating previously composed music into some visual equivalent,
they have extended their work into the field of sound and sound
composition. A special technique has resulted after five years of
constant experiment.

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Beginning with conventional methods of animation the Whit-
ney brothers evolved a process of their own invention which
permits unlimited image control and a new kind of sound track.
First they compose a thematic design in a black and white sketch.
Then by virtue of an optical printer, pantograph and colour
niters, they develop the sketch to cinematic proportions in move-
ment and colour. Multiple exposures, magnification, reduction
and inversion enables them to achieve an infinite variety of com-
positions in time and space.

Their sound is entirely synthetic, a product of their own
ingenuity. Twelve pendulums of various lengths are connected by
means of steel wires to an optical wedge in a recording box. This
wedge is caused to oscillate over a light slit by the movement of
the swinging pendulums which can be operated separately, to-
gether or in combinations. The frequency of the pendulums can
be 'tuned' or adjusted to a full range of audio frequencies. Their
motion is greatly de-magnified and registered as pattern on
motion picture film, which in the sound projector generates tone.
Both image and sound can be easily varied and controlled.

To date the Whitneys have produced five short films which they
call 'exercises'. They are conceived as 'rehearsals for a species of
audio-visual performances'. All are non-representational, made
up of geometric shapes flat and contrasting in colour, posturesque
in pattern, moving on the surface of the screen or in depth by
shifting, interlacing, interlocking and intersecting, fluent and live
in changing waves of colour, the sound rising and falling, advanc-
ing and receding in beats and tones with the images, all moving to
the command of a definite formal basis.

Cold and formal in structure, the Whitney exercises are warm
and diverting in effects. As distinctive experiments in an indepen-
dent cinematic idiom they offer possibilities within the abstract
film that have still to be divulged. They suggest, too, the oppor-
tunities for more complex and plastic ensembles that can be
endowed with power and richness.

A more intuitive approach to non-objective expression are the
fragmentary colour films of Douglas Crockwell: Fantasmagoria,
The Chase, Glenn Falls Sequence. These pictures might be called
'moving painting'. Shape, colour, and action of changing abstract
forms are deliberately improvisational. Full of vagaries, they are

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worked into a situation and out of it by the feeling and imagina-
tion of the film-maker at the moment of composition, solely
motivated by 'the play and hazard of raw material'.

CroekwelTs technique is an extension of the animation method.
His first efforts, the Fantasmagoria series, were made with an over-
head camera and a piece of glass for a surface upon which was
spread oil colours in meaningless fashion and then animated with
stop motion. As the work progressed, other colours were added,
subtracted and manipulated by razor blades, brushes and fingers
as whim dictated. In a later picture, The Chase, non-drying oils
were mixed with the colours, other glass levels added and most
important the painting surface was shifted to the underside of the
glass. This last gave a finished appearance to the paint in all
stages. In Glenn Falls Sequence, his most recent effort, an air
brush and pantograph were added and motion given to the various
glass panels. Also a new method of photography was introduced —
shooting along the incident rays of light source. This eliminated
superfluous shadows in the lower glass levels.

The distinguishing trait of CroekwelTs pictures is their spon-
taneity. Sensuous in colour, fluid in composition, these abstrac-
tions occasionally move into by-passes of dramatic or humorous
action which are exciting and witty, the more so for their un-
expectedness.

Markedly different in approach, technique and style from the
pictures of the other non-objectivists is the film by Sara Arledge
called Introspection. The original plan was a dance film based on
the theme of 'the unfolding of a dance pattern in the conscious
mind of the dancer'. Technical difficulties and lack of funds made
it necessary to present the work done as a series of loosely
connected technical and aesthetic experiments.

In the words of Miss Arledge, 'effective planning of a dance film
has little in common with stage choreography . . . effective
movements of a dancer in film are not necessarily those most
satisfactory on the stage'. None of the detectable patterns of
dance choreography are seen in this picture. There is also none of
the contiguities of shot relationships as indicated in the dance
experiment by Maya Deren; nor are any of the various methods of
animation used. Instead, disembodied parts of dancers are seen
moving freely in black space. Dancers wear tights blacked out

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except for particular parts — a hand, arm, shoulder, torso or entire
body — which are specially coloured and form a moving and
rhythmic three-dimensional design of semi-abstract shapes. The
problem of flatness of the screen which reduces the dancer to a
two-dimensional figure was overcome by an ingenious use of wide
angle lens, convex reflecting surface, special lighting effects, slow
motion and multiple exposures.

The result is a kind of abstraction and a completely new visual
experience, especially heightened when two or three coloured
forms are juxtaposed in multiple exposure. The use of colour is
striking and unlike colour in any other experiment thus far.
Although episodic and incomplete, Introspection is original in
style. Its departure in technique suggests new directions in un-
conventional and abstract cinema.

These experiments in non-objective films reveal the rich possi-
bilities for the most part still unexplored in this field. There
development will come about through a constantly increasing
command over more varied forms and plastic means. As structural
design becomes more and more paramount, colour more sensuous
and complex, movement and sound more firmly knit into the
continuity, simple decoration will give way to deeper aspects of
film form.

A third group of experimentalists at work today aim at the
exact opposite of the non-objective school, and are not concerned
with subjective experience. They attempt to deal with reality.
Unlike the documentary film-makers they seek to make personal
observations and comments on people, nature or the world about
them. Concern for aesthetic values is uppermost. While the sub-
jects in themselves may be slight, they are given importance by
the form and dramatic intensity of expression and the perception
of the film-maker.

The most widely known because of his 'montages' is Slavko
Vorkapich. Ever since he collaborated on A Hollywood Extra back
in 1928, Vorkapich has been interested in film as an artistic
medium of expression. In his fifteen years working in Hollywood
studios, he has tried repeatedly to get people in the industry to
finance experiments, but without results.

Independently he has made two shorts — a pictorial interpre-
tation of Wagner's Forest Murmurs and of Mendelssohn's FingaVs

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Cave (in collaboration with John Hoffman). Both film9 express a
poet's love for nature and a film-maker's regard for cinematic
expression. Extraordinary camerawork captures a multitude of
intimate impressions of the forest and sea. Animals, birds, trees,
water, mist, sky — the very essence and flavour of nature is
assimilated in striking visual sequences whose structural form
blends rhythmically with that of the symphonic music. The two
forms play into each other to increase emotion and intensity of
sensation. Through the perception, richness and order of visual
images woven into the fabric of the films and related to the
central emotion generated by the music, Vorkapich's talent for
agile cinematic expression and poetic vision is revealed. Forest
Murmurs bought by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was withheld as 'too
artistic for general release'.

Somewhat similar in its feeling for nature and form is Storm
Warning photographed and directed by Paul Burnford with an
original score by David Raksin. This picture is a dramatization of
weather, forecasting a storm which sweeps across the United
States. Made as a two-reeler, it was purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer and distributed after re-editing as two different pictures of
one reel each.

The intact version of Storm Warning shows a discerning eye for
significant detail, high skill in photography, and an individual
sense of cinematic construction. From the opening sequence show-
ing the disaster of weather and how primitive man was inadequate
to cope with it, the picture comes alive. It proceeds full of beauti-
ful and expressive shots of people at work, of wind, of rain, snow,
clouds, rivers, ships, streets — of the tenderness and turbulence of
weather affecting modern man. All are made highly dramatic
through selective camera angles and camera movements cut for
continuous flow and varied rhythms.

The highlight of the picture is the approaching storm and its
climax. This begins with a feeling of apprehension. We see leaves,
paper, windmills, trees, etc., blowing in the wind, each shot mov-
ing progressively faster, all movement in the same direction,
creating a feeling of mounting intensity. Then just before the
storm breaks, a forecaster pencils in the storm line on a weather
map. There is a huge close-up of the forecaster's black pencil
approaching the lens. The black pencil quickly dissolves into a

144

35. Ritual in Transfigured Time
(Maya Deren, U.S.A., 1946)

36. Meshes of the Afternoon
(Maya Deren, U.S.A., 1943)

37. At Land

(Maya Deren, U.S.A., 1944)

38. The Battleship Potemkin
(Sergei Eisenstein, U.S.S.R., 1925)

39. Mother

(V. I. Pudovkin, U.S.S.R., 1926)

40. Earth

(Alexander Dovzhenko, U.S.S.R.,

(1930)

AVANT-GARDE PRODUCTION IN AMERICA

black storm cloud moving at the same relative speed in the same
direction, out of which flashes a streak of lightning.

The climax of the storm is reached when a girl on a city street is
caught up in a blizzard. Her hair is violently blown. She covers
her head to protect herself from the wind. This movement is an
upward one. And from this point onward no more people appear,
but only nature in all its violence. The succeeding shots are of the
sea crashing against a stone wall in upward movements, pro-
gressively quicker, and as each wave breaks it fills more and more
of the screen until the last wave obliterates everything from view.
When the last wave crashes into the camera, the upward move-
ments to which the spectator has become conditioned are now
suddenly changed and the final three shots of the sequence — a
burst of lightning, trees violently blowing and furiously swirling
water — move respectively downward, horizontally and circularly.
As opposed to the upward movement this sudden contrast of
movement intensifies the excitement. Furthermore each of the
shots becomes progressively darker so that when the storm
reaches its highest pitch there is almost a natural fade out.

This is immediately followed by a fade in on the quiet aftermath.
In extreme contrast to the violent movement and darkness of the
preceding shots, the screen now shows an ice-covered telegraph
pole, sparkling in the sunlight's reflected rays like a star. This is
followed by scenes of ice-covered trees, white, scintillating shots
which sway with a gentle motion in the breeze. The contrast is so ex-
treme that the scenes take on added beauty by the juxtaposition.

Throughout Raksin's music accentuates the emotion. At the
climax of the storm the music and natural sound effects reach a
point where they rage against each other, clashing, fighting for
power. But in the aftermath immediately following, all natural
sounds cease and the music becomes only a quiet background
effect, so soft it is scarcely heard, as delicate and crystal-like as
the ice-covered trees.

The impact of the picture is forceful and moving. The spectator
seems actually to participate in what is taking place on the screen
and is swept along on a rising tide of emotion. The method of
achieving this effect is the result of an extraordinary facility and
command of expression which permeates Storm Warning and
makes it a notable contribution to experimental cinema.

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Another film-maker experimenting in this field of observation
and comment is Lewis Jacobs. Tree Trunk to Head was an
attempt to reveal Chaim Gross, the modern sculptor, at work in
his studio carving a head out of the trunk of a tree. The personal-
ity of the sculptor, his mannerisms, his characteristic method of
work, his technique are intimately disclosed in minute details, as
though unobserved — a sort of candid-camera study. Dramatic
form and cinematic structure endow the presentation with excite-
ment, humour and interest.

The basic structural element of the film is movement. The shots
and the action within the shots are all treated as modifications of
and aspects of movement. The introduction which deals with in-
animate objects — finished works of Gross' sculpture — is given
movement by a series of pans and tilts. These camera movements
are repeated in various directions to create a pattern of motion.
The sizes and shapes of the sculpture in these shots are likewise
arranged and edited in patterns of increasing and diminishing
progression, to create a sense of continuous motion.

The climax of the sequence is reached with a series of statues of
waxed and highly polished surfaces. Unlike those which precede
them they are given no camera movement, but achieve movement
through a progression of diminishing scale and tempo. The first
statue fills the entire screen frame. The second, four-fifths. The
third, three-quarters and so on down the scale until the final
statue — a figurine about the size of a hand stands at the very
bottom of the screen. These shots are all cut progressively shorter
so that the effect is a speeding downward movement to the bottom
of the screen. Suddenly the final shot of the sequence looms up,
covering the entire screen frame. In contrast to the glistening
statues we have just seen, this is a huge, dull, massive trunk of a
tree slowly revolving to reveal a bark of rough, corrugated tex-
ture and implying in effect that all those shiny smooth works of
art originated from this crude, dead piece of wood.

From the tree trunk the camera pans slowly to the right to
include behind it the sculptor at work on a preliminary drawing
for his portrait-to-be. Posing for him is his model. Thus begins the
body of the film which in contrast to the beginning is made up of
static shots, but treated as part of a design in movement by hav-
ing the action within each shot uncompleted. Each shot is cut on

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a point of action and continued in the next shot. No shot is held
beyond its single point in the effort to instil a lively internal
tempo.

A subsidiary design of movement is made up from the com-
binations of sizes and shapes of the subject-matter. This is
achieved through repetition, progression or contrast of close-ups,
medium shots and long shots of the sculptor at work. A third
design is made up of the direction of the action within the shots in
terms of patterns of down, up, to the left or to the right. Some-
times these are contrasted or repeated, depending on the nature
of the sculptor's activity. By the strict regard for tempo in these
intermediary designs, the overall structure maintains a fluid,
rhythmic integration.

Sunday Beach, another film by Lewis Jacobs, tells the story of
how people spend their Sunday on the beach — any public beach.
The camera observes families, adolescents, children, and the
lonely ones arriving in battered cars, buses and by foot, setting
up their little islands of umbrellas and blankets, undressing and
removing their outer garments, relaxing, bathing, reading, eating,
gambling, playing, love-making, sleeping, quarrelling and return-
ing home to leave the beach empty again at the end of the day.

The picture is photographed without the people's knowledge or
awareness that they are subjects for the camera. This was achieved
through the use of long focus lenses — four, six and twelve
inches — and other subterfuges of candid-camera photography. By
this means it was possible to capture the fleeting honesty of
people's demeanour and their activities when unobserved. The
effect of such unposed and realistic detail is revealing and often
moving.

Since the subject-matter could at no point be staged or con-
trolled— had to be stolen so to speak — a formal design as originally
planned could not be executed without eliminating many happy
accidents of naturalistic behaviour. In order to retain as much of
the expressive flavour of the unposed people the preliminary plan
had to be adjusted to allow the material itself to dictate the
structure. The aim, then, was to cut the picture so that the under-
lying structural design would be integrated with the spontaneity
of the subject and the intervention of the film-maker would not
be apparent.

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Like the non- objective film-makers, this group of what might
be called 'realists' are essentially formalists. But unlike the for-
mer, they are striving for a convincing reality in which the means
are not the end, but the process by which human values are
projected. What is essential in that process is that it should have
individuality and express the film-maker's perception of the
world in which he lives.

Thomas Bouchard is a film-maker who follows none of the ten-
dencies yet defined. He has been working independently with all
the difficulties of confined space and income since about 1938. His
first experiments in film (influenced by his work in still photo-
graphy) dealt with the contemporary dance. His purpose was not
to film the narration of the dance but to catch those moments
when the dancer has lost awareness of routine and measure and
the camera is able to seize the essential details of expression,
movement and gesture.

To date Bouchard has made four such films in colour: The
Shakers, based on the primitive American theme of religious
ecstasy by Doris Humphrys and Charles Weidman and their
group, the Flamenco dancers Rosario and Antonio, the 'queen of
gypsy dancers' Carmen Amaya, and Hanya Holm's Golden Fleece.

A versatile and sensitive photographer, Bouchard shows a feel-
ing for picturesque composition, expressive movement, and a
preference for deep, acid colours. His films show none of the sense
for 'chorecinema' as expressed in Maya Deren's A Study in
Choreography for the Dancer, or the awareness for abstract distor-
tion for the sake of design apparent in Sara Arledge's Introspec-
tion, but indicate rather a natural sensitiveness and camera
fertility. Essentially his pictures are reproductions of dance
choreography, not filmic recreations. His search is not for an in-
dividual filmic conception, but for a rendering of fleeting move-
ment.

More recently Bouchard turned to painters and painting for
subjects of his films. The New Realism of Fernand Leger and Jean
Helion — One Artist at Work are his latest efforts. The Leger film
has a commentary by the artist himself and music by Edgar
Varese. The intention of this film is to give not only an account of
the new painting Leger did while in America, but also to show its
place in the development of modern art and is experimental in its

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personal approach. Leger is shown at leisure gathering materials
and ideas for his canvases in the streets of New York and the
countryside of New Hampshire. Then he is seen at work, revealing
his method of abstraction by showing him drawing and painting
his impressions of the motifs he found in his wanderings.

The Helion film follows a similar approach with the painter as
his own narrator and a score by Stanley Bates. Like the Leger
film, the latter picture, relaxed and intimate, is done in the style
of the photo-story.

In these as in the dance films, the medium serves mainly as a
recording instrument. Bouchard's camera has a distinctive rhe-
toric, but it is the rhetoric of still photography.

Looming up with significance and now in the final stages of
editing and scoring, are pictures by Hans Richter, Joseph Vogel
and Chester Kessler. These films might be classified as examples
of a combination subjective-objective style. They deal with facets
of the outer and inner life and rely upon the contents of the in-
ward stream of consciousness — a source becoming more and more
the material of experimental film-makers.

The most ambitious from the point of view of production is the
feature length colour film, Dreams that Money Can Buy, directed
by Hans Richter, the famous European avant-garde film pioneer.
In production for almost two years, the picture will be a 'docu-
mentation of what modern artists feel'. In addition to Richter,
five artists — Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Man
Ray and Alexander Calder — contributed five 'scenarios' for five
separate sequences. Richter supplied the framework which ties all
the material together.

The picture tells the story of seven people who come to a
heavenly psychiatrist to escape the terrible struggle for survival.
The psychiatrist looks into their eyes and sees the images of their
dreams, then sends them back with 'the satisfying doubt of
whether the inner world is not just as real (and more satisfying)
as the outer one'.

Each of the visions in the inner eye are colour sequences
directed after suggestions, drawings, objects (or as in the case of
Man Ray from an original script), of the five artists. Leger con-
tributed a version of American folklore: the love story of two
window mannequins; it is accompanied by the lyrics of John

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Latouche. A drawing by Max Ernst inspired the idea for the story
of the 'passion and desire of a young man listening to the dreams
of a young girl'. Paul Bowles wrote the music and Ernst supplied
a stream-of-consciousness monologue. Marcel Duchamp offered
his colour records together with 'the life- animation of his famous
painting, Nude Descending a Staircase*. John Cage did the music.
Man Ray's story is a satire of movies and movie audiences, in
which the audience imitates the action on the screen. Darius
Milhaud wrote the score. Alexander Calder's mobiles are treated
as 'a ballet in the universe'. Music by Edgar Varese accompanies
it. Richter's own sequence, the last in the film, tells a Narcissus
story of a man who meets his alter ego, discovers his real face is
blue and becomes an outcast from society.

The total budget for Dreams That Money Can Buy was under
fifteen thousand dollars. This is less than the cost of a Hollywood-
produced black and white short of one reel. Artist and movie-
maker, Richter feels that the lack of great sums of money is a
challenge to the ingenuity of the film-maker. 'If you have no
money,' he says, 'you have time — and there is nothing you cannot
do with time and effort.'

A second picture in the offing is House of Cards, by Joseph Vogel,
a modern painter. This film attempts to delineate the thin thread
of reality upon which hangs the precarious balance of sanity in a
modern, high-pressure world and is essentially 'a reflection in the
tarnished mirror held up by that stringent and gospel of lies — our
daily press'.

'I realized', Vogel said, 'that the very nature of the story called
for a departure from conventional approach. I felt that the form
of the picture should assume a style of its own conditioned by the
imagery, stylization of action and acting technique, as well as a
kind of stream-of-consciousness autopsy performed on the brain
of the principal character.'

Such a deliberately free approach afforded Vogel the opportunity
of creating pictorial elements which stem from his experience as a
painter and graphic artist. His own lithographs serve as settings
for a number of backgrounds. Aided by John and James Whitney,
the non-objective film-makers, he devised a masking technique in
conjunction with the optical printer to integrate lithographs with
live action into an architectural whole.

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A third picture nearing completion is Chester Kessler's Plague
Summer, an animated cartoon film adapted from Kenneth Pat-
chen's novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight. It is a record of a
journey of six allegorical characters through landscapes brutalized
by war and 'the chronicle of an inner voyage through the mental
climate of a sensitive artist in the war-torn summer of 1940'.

The drawings for this film made by Kessler share nothing in
common with the typical bam- wham cartoons. They are original
illustrations, drawn with extraordinary imagination. Sensitive to
screen shape, space, tone and design, they make the commonplace
fantastic through juxtaposition of elements and relation to un-
likely locales, as well as by a subjective transformation of their
appearances.

In addition to these almost completed films there are others in
various stages of production. * Except for Horror Dream by
Sidney Peterson, with an original score by John Cage, they are
non-objective experiments: Absolute Films 2, 3, 4, by Harry
Smith, Transmutation by Jordan Belson, Meta by Robert Howard,
and Suite 12 by Harold McCormick and Albert Hoflich.

Since the end of World War II, the experimental film has
gained a new, enhanced status. Perhaps the most encouraging
sign of this is the financial aids granted by two major institu-
tions which offer fellowships for work in the fields of art and
science. In 1946 — for the first time — the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation awarded a grant (approximately twenty-
five hundred dollars) for further experimental film work to Maya
Deren. The same year the Whitney brothers received a grant from
the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation. In 1947 the Whitneys
received a second grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Me-
morial Foundation.

Along with financial support has come critical recognition. In
the past two years three new magazines devoted to the art of
motion pictures have appeared: The Hollywood Quarterly, The
Screen Writer and Cinema. Each of these periodicals recognize the
film as a creative medium. They advocate the highest standards

* Since this article was written two unusual films have been completed by Kent
Munson and Theodore Huff ; The Uncomfortable Man, a study of a personality
split by forces of a great city : and The Stone Children, an ironic allegory made in
Hollywood. Filled with candid photography, both films contain philosophical
implications.

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and support the independent and experimental film worker.

By its contributions and accomplishments the experimental
film has and will continue to have an effect on motion picture
progress and upon the medium as an artistic means of expression.
In many cases those who have begun as experimental film-makers
have gone on to make their contribution in other fields of film
work. Hollywood film-makers have had their horizons broadened
and often incorporated ideas gleaned from experimental efforts.
But even more than this, some experimental films must be con-
sidered as works of art in their own right. Despite shortcomings
and crudities they have assumed more and not less importance
with the passage of time. All over the country, in colleges, univer-
sities, museums, experimental films, old and new are being revived
and exhibited over and over again. Such exhibitions not only
create new audiences, enlarge the cinematic sphere, inspire pro-
ductions, but aid in that transcendence of itself which every art
must achieve.

Today a new spirit of independence, of originality and of crea-
tive experiment in film -making has begun to assert itself. Behind
some of the tendencies can still be seen the old European avant-
garde influence and technique. But others have begun to reach out
for more indigenous forms and styles. All are compelling in terms
of their own standards and aims and each beats the drum for the
experimenter's right to self-expression. The future for experi-
mental films is more promising than ever.

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BY GRIGORI ROSHAL

WHAT IS experiment IN cinema? A new solution of problems,
a new use of certain elements inherent in the art, the discovery of
new approaches.

The cinema is a particular kind of art. It is an art born of high
technical achievement. The possibilities of cinematography have
grown, and will grow, together with scientific and technical
development.

The mastery of the film medium lies in the artist's ability to
adapt these technical resources for the purposes of art, for inter-
preting the advanced ideas of our times. The greater an artist's
control of technical resources, the sooner they become as familiar
as the colours on a painter's palette, or rhythm and sound in a
composer's score, or marble and bronze in the hands of a sculptor,
the more perfect the film-maker's artistry.

An artist should master technique, but he must not be subser-
vient to it. Technical research carried out for its own sake has
always impoverished art. It led to unmotivated formalism, to
playing with the material for the sake of the game, to mere
aesthetic vignettes (however great the technical resources em-
ployed in work of this kind). Only by striving to attain the highest
artistic generalization, only when the aim is to penetrate into
life's greatest depths, does technique enrich the artist, making his
contribution significant, and the image created by him many-
faceted.

What does penetrating into life's greatest depths mean? It

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means knowing how to extract from life all the things which,
communicated through the complicated counter-rhythms of a
film, Mill make life more understandable, more pregnant with
meaning than it is in the usual, hurried, everyday experience of
the spectator.

The genuine artist does not simply register life, he strives to
reflect its laws, to indicate the course of its development, he
occupies the same commanding position in shaping life as do
philosophers, scientists and politicians. Hence Stalin's definition
of the masters of art as engineers of the human soul. In fact, a
genuine experiment always unites innovation in form with the
underlying idea and is never severed from life.

In this sense, the Soviet cinema has been a cinema of experi-
ment from the outset. What was the state of affairs in the years
when Soviet cinematography was founded? The screens were then
filled with films interpreting, with greater or lesser talent, the
"deeply moving' themes of languishing love, adulterous catas-
trophes and unimaginable allurements in dazzling finery or
nudity. Whatever the theme, whatever world events may have
passed before the camera's objective, in the final count everything
was reduced to the same thing: a triangle. A triangle dominating
all things: man - woman - man, woman - man - woman. Some-
times the triangles overlapped, sometimes they were painted in
various psychological colours, or dressed up in seeming profund-
ity, yet, in essence, all this was but the pre-history of cinema as
art.

Separate attempts of such masters as Griffith, Chaplin and
others changed nothing in the general state of affairs. In films for
so-called mass distribution, which impressed by the brilliance of
their decor and expensive sumptuousness, creative thought was
smothered in glued-on beards, powdered wigs, crinolines and
trailing skirts. It lay prostrate at the feet of capricious stars. The
dejected extras who bore the brunt of erupting volcanoes, crumb-
ling cities and disasters at sea, were a mere submissive, unthink-
ing background for the heroes in the limelight.

Like a bomb exploding in this stifling film world came Eisen-
stein's picture, magnificent in its simplicity and power, full of fire,
the fife-giving fire of art. The standard of Potemkin was unfurled
over the screens of the world, becoming a symbol of all new,

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daring and genuine experiment in art, inspired by the spirit of
youth and faith in humanity. It was the voice of our country,
rising from the screens of the silent cinema with the might of a
symphony.

What happened? Eisenstein removed all the annoying trivial-
ities, cheap passions and genteel fancies from the ledgers of the
cinema. It became clear that the epic in cinematography was not
connected with accountancy in the cost of crowd scenes. Simple
human emotions and actions revealed so much epic beauty, that
all the hitherto unshakable canons of cinematic 'beauty' faded,
scorched by the ardour of this film. The battleship itself became
an image of human feelings. When the squadron made way for the
revolutionary battleship Potemkin, and the raised muzzles of
the cannons did not fire, both the Potemkin and the squadron
were as living personages, for they symbolized an expression of
human feelings, unprecedented in power, power arising from the
men's self-dedication to a national cause and their adherence to a
community, so unlike the customary crowds in films.

When the sailors, covered by a tarpaulin, awaited the last
volley which would take their lives, the audiences of the whole
world identified themselves with the men standing under that
fatal tarpaulin. Always and everywhere there was a burst of
applause at the moment when, casting the tarpaulin aside, the
men rebelled. This was new. This was cinematic art.

This was art which demanded daring experimentation, a search
for new forms, and Eisenstein found them. It became apparent
that montage in cinematography is not simply a consecutive join-
ing of separately filmed shots, but a complicated and intelligent
scoring, reminiscent of a genuine symphonic score, with its own
kind of vocalization, theme melody and orchestration.

Indeed, the scenery was not just a view of the sea, or, say, a
picture of clouds or of a town — all the backgrounds were included
in the musical phrases of montage, creating an accompaniment
for the passionate melodies of revolution, which, in their turn,
were fused in the leading motifs of the battleship, sailors and in-
dividual persons who, from time to time, were brought to the fore
in this monumental symphony.

This or that combination of fragments, their length, the tone of
the lighting, accents on meaning — all this was enriched by so

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much ingenuity in selection and such brilliance in the creation of
associations, that the picture Potemkin can rightly be considered
the first film of emotional and intellectual montage. Montage
made it possible to reveal the profound meaning of events with
impressive clarity and to convey the musical feeling of the theme
in a silent film. The shots of streets and bridges taken at cross
angles to each other are musical because of the alternation and
combination of the rhythms in which the torrents of people move
towards the battleship.

And, in the midst of this torrent of movement, the battleship,
calm, rather triumphant and very beautiful, appears as a citadel,
a pledge of future victories.

Then there is the burst of passions in the famous scene of the
struggle with the officers, when the visual allegro of a succession
of shots is like a musical interpretation of a dynamic tornado of
separate episodes in the battle. Each shot appears as if it were
flying in the wind. Or the immobility of the crowd confronting the
continuous, march-like advance of the cordon of soldiers. Though
the cinema was silent, this counterpoint in themes, this juxta-
position of clear and honest faces with rows of guns and stamping
boots, came as the sound of the complex music of events. It was
pierced by close-ups of people in distress, corresponding to
passages on separate instruments. Eisenstein's beautiful film can
be studied shot by shot endlessly. There is that wonderful musical
phrase — the candle, flickering in the hands of the dead sailor, and
faces, an entire gallery of faces, illumined by its faint glimmer.
Stillness gradually descends upon the scene; and the artist has
compressed it, as it were, making the silence almost palpable.

I think that even now the excellent first principles of the epic
film for mass audiences as indicated in Potemkin have not yet
been fully realized, either by Eisenstein himself or by the cinema
in general.

The musical characteristics of montage, which Eisenstein had
already discovered in the silent cinema, his conception of a
sequence of shots as a sequence of melody, rhythms and musical
themes, was revealed in a new way in his creative work on several
sound films. Among Eisenstein's experimental pictures of this
kind the outstanding one is Alexander Nevsky. It has much in
common with Battleship Potemkin, above all Eisenstein's ability

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to integrate the movement within a sequence of shots with the
movement of montage. Moreover, while in the silent cinema the
rhythm was created by joining together silent strips of film, in Alex-
ander Nevsky this same rhythm became an audible symphony. The
fruitful collaboration of Eisenstein as director and the remarkable
composer Prokofiev on the making of Nevsky resulted in the
famous march of the German 'knights', the wonderful cadences of
Russian choirs, and in the legendary quality of the whole narra-
tive. But the difference in themes and in the scale of the action
makes it impossible to equate Potemkin with Nevsky.

It would seem, however, that Eisenstein has not yet spoken his
decisive word in regard to the sound film. True, the clear-cut
severity of one of his early sound films, Ivan* and the expressive-
ness of its montage, foreshadow the enormous powers latent in
him, but films where the dominant element is the direction of a
small cast of actors still seem to restrict him. He only finds scope
in the broad movements of great populous scenes. They are the
best in all his films.

If Eisenstein threw new light on to the broad expanses of epic
themes, another master, Vsevolod Pudovkin, also an excellent
experimenter of our cinema, penetrated into the very depths of
the human mind, and caught the minutest vibrations of the
human soul. Mother was also something new in world cinema.
Mother was also the revelation in film language of hitherto un-
discovered details of human behaviour. And here again montage
proved to be a fine instrument supplied to the artist by the
cinema.

Pudovkin does not build up a character by concentrating solely
on the individual behaviour of a given actor. The behaviour of
one actor is only one of the component parts of a characterization.
A complete portrayal is created by Vsevolod Pudovkin as a result
of combining a series of montage elements. Pudovkin creates an
atmosphere around his heroes, which is the external continuation,
as it were, of their inner world. Being the first to introduce the
idea of creating characterizations by means of montage in films,
he has done in the cinema what Dickens did in novels.

A wind can be the continuation of the storm raging in a human
soul; the slow dripping of water becomes alert tension; the ice

* This film should not be confused with Eisenstein's later film series Ivan the Terrible.

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THE SOVIET FILM

breaking up on a turbulent river can reveal joyous expectations;
a kid glove on a closed fist can complete the smart, hard-fisted
appearance of an officer in the gendarmerie.

In the picture Mother, Pudovkin made wonderful use of con-
trasts in scale and contrasts in tone: a big man and a small one;
the enormous policeman, grotesquely large sentries, the giant-like
father — these are all the colossi of the past, obtrusive, frighten-
ing, oppressive. Opposing them are the turbulent forces of youth
— the wonderful spring flood of the river, rushing streams, the
swift and delicate particles of ice, the banner radiant in the sun-
shine. Spring cannot be held back! The world will burst into
flower, however tragic the fate of one of the combatants may have
been.

The film is filled with tremendous optimism. The mother, a
fragile old woman, possesses so much beauty of feeling, so much
love, that her image remains for ever in one's memory as an
inspired and youthful image.

It was Pudovkin who made the most searching study of the
hidden laws of montage. It was he who began to draw on the most
complicated technical resources of cinematography in order to
achieve characterization in films. He affirmed that the cinema
could be more daring in dealing with time and space than it had
yet been. The cinema could steal time and prolong it. And this is
a means of artistic expression. Already in the film A Descendant of
Genghis Khan he gave an unforgettable impression of the state of
mind of a whole group of people by using a rhythmic pattern: the
same shot taken at two different speeds. A row of soldiers who are
to shoot a man, raise their rifles. The soldiers' reluctance, their
indecision and anguish, their subordination to a discipline over-
powering everything — all this is expressed by Pudovkin, not by
showing the experiences of separate persons, or by a mass mise en
scene, revealing hesitations. He uses the following rhythmical
method: the soldiers raise their rifles shoulder-high in slow motion
— the slowness is exaggerated. In real life this would be impos-
sible. This is the speed at which the soldiers would have liked to
raise their rifles, and the point is communicated to the spectator
unmistakably. And the second half of the movement shows the
rifles at shoulder level, and the shooting. The tempo here is
speeded up to normal, but the normal speed has the appearance

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THE SOVIET FILM

of being three times faster than it actually is. What a pity that
this new cinematic device is so seldom utilized !

In his film A Simple Case, Pudovkin again made use of the
possibility to prolong time in the famous scene with the doors,
when doors became an emotional factor, opening and closing, not
according to the laws of empirical realism, but according to the
laws of realistic imagery. They were opened and closed, now
slowly, now swiftly, exaggeratedly slowly and exaggeratedly
swiftly.

In the film Deserter, montage produces such flowing rapidity,
in the succession of shots, that the struggle for the banner and the
clash between the demonstrators and the police look like the zig-
zag of a flash of lightning. The pattern of shots attains such vivid-
ness, one shot flowing into another, becoming fused one with the
other, that ordinary shots create an extraordinary impression.
The spectator is stunned and caught up in the wave of events.

An amazing feeling for the unity of form and content and a
perfect mastery of the art of montage help Pudovkin to reveal an
intelligent and passionate world in his films. It is the world of a
noble struggle, a world with a clear aim leading towards happiness
for mankind.

Neither Eisenstein nor Pudovkin have achieved the tenderness
and warmth in speaking about men and the world that Alexander
Dovzhenko has revealed. Dovzhenko is always experimental. He
is always an innovator and always a poet. If Eisenstein's quest is
the vastness of epic themes, if Pudovkin probes into the depths of
human thought and feeling, Dovzhenko seeks to reveal the wisdom
and fullness of the very world itself. Yes, Dovzhenko's world is a
wise world. It is wise because its flowering gardens are peopled;
because man has sown its golden fields ; because mankind,
eternally alive, has trodden its paths, built its cities, cultivated
the land, conquered the seas. The world is wise because mankind
is making it so, because mankind sees and loves it as such. And
Dovzhenko's films are poems about man.

In Earth, Dovzhenko elaborated this theme with magnificent
and unsurpassed power. Even death, man's ordinary death,
cannot darken the radiant happiness of a full life. But murder,
hatred and evil — they throw the entire world into darkness, they
injure the very heart of life, hurting all living things on earth.

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Who are these enemies of life? What are the forces destroying the
laws of harmony among men? They are the enemies of all things
new, vicious egoists, property owners, existing for themselves
alone, clinging to their belongings, wishing to put the whole world
in chains, to fence in the fields, to drive men with a whip. With
what passionate hatred and poetical force Dovzhenko depicts
them! And how much noble poetry there is in his portrayal of
pure-hearted people, going forward through life, ordinary Soviet
people. His daring is the daring of a true artist, and his chief
instrument is also montage. But in using montage, he is also a
poet. His montage moves gently and gracefully, like the Ukrain-
ian language, like Ukrainian song. He loves nature in all its
manifestations and in all its magnificence. Apple trees bend
towards the auditorium, as it were, weighed down by the fruit.
Life-giving rivulets of rain glide over the screen. Transparent
clouds soar over vast expanses. Clear-eyed girls dream by the
deep waters of a lake. And even war cannot trample down all the
wild flowers that grow in such profusion in the green fields.
Dovzhenko's world is filled with songs, songs about nobility,
about inspired thoughts, about the wisdom of life and of death.
His films about the Civil War are films about a struggle for a full
life. His Chors was not only a warrior, not only a chieftain, he
was also a poet. In the lovely scene, where they dreamed of the
world's future, Chors was inspired and youthful, and his blood-
stained soldiers, as pure-hearted as children on the threshold of a
new era. The character Bozhenko was funny, witty and rather
incongruous. He was not very literate and none too well educated,
but he, too, was a poet who had come from some ancient Ukrain-
ian legend on to the vast battlefields of a social war. And when he
was killed, the very fields and skies became part of the solemn
cortege that followed him. Before closing his eyes for the last time
he surveyed the earth's wide horizons, absorbing the view into
himself, as it were, and that is how he remains in the spectator's
memory.

Dovzhenko managed to combine the simplicity and humour in
background' scenes, redolent of black earth, resin, tar and the
sweat of human bodies, with the poetry and pathos of noble feel-
ings and tremendous daring. And in his work these two wings of
stylization are not placed side by side, they work alternately,

160

41. The New Gulliver

(A. Ptushko, U.S.S.R., 1935)

42. Chors

(Alexander Dovzhenko, U.S.S.R.,

1939)

Sri m

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t-, w

ri f

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43. Childhood of Maxim Gorki
(Mark Donskoi, U.S.S.R., 1938)

44. The Vow

(M. Chiaureli, U.S.S.R., 1946)

f {

45. Alexander Nevskr
(Sergei Eisenstein, U.S.S.R., 1938)

46. Robinson Crusoe:
Stereoscopic film

(A. Andrievskv, U.S.S.R.
1946)

THE SOVIET FILM

each penetrating into the other's sphere, and becoming fused in a
complex pattern.

Unlike Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Dovzhenko often held scenes
on the screen for a considerable length of time, already in his
silent films. He liked to make his world revolve slowly before the
eyes of his spectators, so as to make his melodies more tangible.
And though not all Dovzhenko's films are based on folklore, it can
be said that all his films are contemporary legends, contemporary
folklore, created by cinematic means.

Dovzhenko's art is monolithic. It is hard to establish a dividing
line in his films between so-called artistic cinematography and
documentary. Dovzhenko has shown that the documentary film
can be genuinely poetical publicity. The capture of towns by real
soldiers is no less dramatic and triumphant than the complicated
battles staged in feature films. The newsreels made by Dovzhenko
during the war and his film In the Name of Our Soviet Ukraine,
are not like the usual war films, and in them Dovzhenko has
revealed the full measure of his talent and originality, drawing
on his total experience as an artist and experimenter. The
narrative, written by himself, does not comment on the scenes,
it is entwined among them, completing the pictorial images
created by cinematic means. The very selection of the material
from the rich store of newsreels is peculiar. And working on this
newsreel material, Dovzhenko reaffirms the poetical elements
inherent in man, the nobility of his feelings, the beauty of his
achievement and the wisdom of his world. In spite of the chaos,
fire and destruction, all Dovzhenko's newsreels have faith in the
future and are full of optimism, and this is achieved by means of
the self-same daring combination of the 'low' and the lofty.
A commander's grim and simple speech is not weakened but
strengthened by scenes of weary soldiers, resting in quite in-
formal dress. A close-up of a stretcher with the body of a com-
mander killed in battle, heightens the pathos of the battle. It is
not terrifying to look at this dead man: the eyes of the soldiers
gazing upon him will retain his image in future campaigns.

Recently Dovzhenko has been working on a film about the
horticulturist Michurin. This is his first colour film. Michurin, an
ardent lover of life, was an innovator, devoted heart and soul to
his country, his ideal and his task — he is Dovzhenko's perfect

n 161

THE SOVIET FILM

hero. No wonder Dovzhenko has not only written the scenario (as
he does for all this films), but also a stage play founded on the
subject. It will be exceedingly interesting to see Dozvhenko's use
of colour.

It is to be anticipated that colour will enrich Alexander Dov-
zhenko's world, and in his picture it will hardly be used as mere
colouring for grey objects. True, in several experimental pieces
(not yet shown) Eisenstein has already discovered a series of bold
and intriguing solutions, indicating an approach, pointing to-
wards the dramatic power of colour combinations and the signifi-
cance in colour sequences. But in Dovzhenko's film about
Michurin certain poetical methods of intrinsic value will be
prompted by the theme itself.

The whole point is — to what extent will the technical resources
correspond to the master's ideas.

At the present time the Soviet cinema is devoting much atten-
tion to technical experiment. Also, it can be said that the
stereoscopic film is being born — indeed, it has been born — in the
Soviet cinema. Like every new technical discovery, it is, as yet, far
from perfect. In fact, not every shot is fully stereoscopic, not all
scenes are photographed in an interesting manner, and the
technique of screening, it seems to me, should be considerably
improved. Nevertheless, even the first film makes it quite appar-
ent that the stereo-cinema will become the main form of cinema-
tography in the future. Colour-sound-stereoscopic cinema is no
longer a fantasy, it is a fact. Perhaps the new-born babe is
reminiscent of a little old man, covered in wrinkles. As we know,
an infant's wrinkles disappear. It is worse in the case of the
sceptic's wrinkles — they cannot be smoothed. But, in admitting
that the stereo-cinema is a reality, needing to be improved and
perfected, I would like to mention certain particuliarities of this
new form of film art. The stereo-cinema is not remarkable because
it is three-dimensional. It is remarkable because its three-dimen-
sional world is even more stereoscopic than the real world. Space
is registered more sharply, there is a more specific distinction
between distance and proximity, heaviness and lightness, trans-
parence and darkness. The world of the stereo-cinema enfolds the
spectator from all sides. The spectator is included in its sphere.
Birds fly over your shoulder; leaves flutter and fall past your

162

THE SOVIET FILM

knees; branches stretch out towards you; you descend into exca-
vations, you sail on the boundless seas, and, as the wind rises, the
sails nearly touch you.

The most remarkable thing is the intensity of individual per-
ception. It is hard to imagine that your neighbour is experiencing
the same thing. And this is quite understandable: if you see the
wind tearing one single leaf off a single branch and, floating past
your face, the leaf gently falls to the ground at your feet, how
could it also fall down in front of each of the hundred and fifty
chairs in the auditorium.

The possibilities for using music in stereo-films are quite
peculiar. This is clear from the first stereoscopic pictures made.
Sound and orchestration will undoubtedly also present an acute
problem. These are the first steps in perfecting the art of stereo-
cinema. But even today there can be no doubt that the stereo-
cinema is no mere 'attraction', as it is called by many. It is an art,
demanding its own means of expression and possessing its own
artistic possibilities.

I am one of those who believe in the future of this wonderful
form of cinematography. I can well imagine what results it will
give in the hands of those masters of the Soviet cinema who are
capable of putting technical resources at the service of their
creative ideas. I very much regret that such a master experi-
menter as Alexander Ptushko, director of New Gulliver and Stone
Flower, could not utilize stereoscopy in his new production. The
stereo-cinema could have given him a wealth of new resources,
enabling him to incarnate his fantasies of folklore. Alexander
Ptushko's work is very curious. He began making puppet films,
creating an entire world of dolls. These dolls could move and
smile, and they were no less fascinating than animated cartoons.
What is more, they possessed a singular charm of their own, and
some of these dolls became favourite and entrancing personalities.
Working on my scenario for New Gulliver, Ptushko showed how
much an inventive director can do by means of combined photo-
graphy. He altered the script many times, adapting it to his needs.
He was constantly searching for new ways to portray his puppet
heroes. And in the miniature world of the Lilliputians the insati-
able Ptushko created a still more diminutive land of the Micropu-
tians. Those poor Microputians enslaved by the Lilliputians! On

163

THE SOVIET FILM

Gulliver's table (he was a pioneer who had come into this world)
the Microputians gaily danced an incredible measure, while the
puppet compere drove them on and clicked his heels in front of
the king. It might have seemed that only grotesque and phantas-
magoric films were Ptushko's sphere. But in Stone Flo wer Ptushko
set his fantasy in a lyrical key, he painted his dream lake in poeti-
cal water colours, and found such tender hues for the wonderful
tale by the Ural folk-story-teller Bazhov, that now and again one
even missed the sharp edge of the grotesque which was present in
Ptushko's former films. However, it might have been out of place
in this picture. Now he is working on a major film about the first
post-war Five- Year Plan, about our wonderful new constructions,
the valour of the workers rebuilding our mines, the daring of our
scientists in the Taiga, the poetry of the polar snowstorms and
the Northern Lights — about the whole of our ardent, creative and
inspired country.

In this picture Ptushko intends to use the most complicated
process photography and all the latest technical discoveries,
which cease to be 'technical' in his films and become part of the
artistic pattern of the production. The director Sergei Gerasimov
has done some highly interesting experimental work in his film
about the heroic achievement of the Communist Youth in Kras-
nodon, who fought honourably in the rear of the enemy, and died
proudly, conscious that they were invincible. Gerasimov began by
assembling a cast among young actors and students who had not
yet graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography. His
work with them commenced in an unusual way, that is, with a
theatrical production of the film script based on Fadeev's novel
Young Guard. As a result of long and determined work on the part
of the youthful unit under Gerasimov's direction, an extremely
curious, pointed and fascinating theatrical show was produced,
though Gerasimov's aim was not to enrich the repertory of the
theatre, but merely to round off with the production of this play
the period of rehearsals preceding the shooting of the film. This
idea of Gerasimov's was a complete success. When shooting com-
menced, Gerasimov was able to obtain such results from his young
artistes as would have simply been impossible without the serious
creative rehearsals in the theatre. Gerasimov's experimental work
proved to be a means of enriching film art.

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THE SOVIET FILM

However, there is another thing to be said. The play proved to
be so interesting in itself that I believe, even after the production
of the film it will remain in the repertory of the Film Actors'
Theatre, in which it was produced. This new show is reminiscent
of the best productions of the Moscow Art Theatre Studios, which
once determined the development of these excellent theatres.
This production also does not aim at external effect; it, too, is
founded on the highly ethical content of the film script-play; it,
too, appeals to the better feelings of the spectator and actor,
drawing you into the story, as it were, and making you a partici-
pant in its action. In this show the stage ends behind the doors
of the auditorium.

Another interesting point is the way the atmosphere of the
future film was verified through the play. This atmosphere was
created by the designer Mandel. The rolling mists of the Donetz
Basin, the pyramids of slag, the ladders and cages and towers of
the mines, the clouds driven in the wind, the gleam of distant
lights. The scene of the execution of two partisans has been
devised in a very interesting manner: human silhouettes are
visible on a background of a cloudy sky. These silhouettes, devoid
of all particularities, make this a generalized scene,at taining
tragic simplicity.

The simple rooms, the realistic way of life — all free of cinematic
glamour — are very well presented. Long, unhurried passages of
dialogue and the general tone of thoughtful quietness, make this
heroic world of mortal, clandestine struggle intimate and close,
very serious and important. Handsome faces, good, clear voices.
One imagines that when facing the camera the actors did not lose
their spontaneity or their simplicity or their youthful infectious-
ness.

The success of the production in the Film Actors' Theatre,
based on the screenplay of the new film Young Guard, shows that
the cinema and the theatre have much to give each other by
collaborating. The experimental solution of many of the artistic
problems of the cinema with the aid of the scenic resources of the
theatre — is one of the great achievements of Soviet cinemato-
graphy.

The work of a director such as Michael Romm was the develop-
ment in the cinema of work done by the masters of the theatre

165

THE SOVIET FILM

Stanislavsky, Nemirovich and Vakhtangov. Romm's famous films
about Lenin showed that the method of scenic truthfulness
founded by Stanislavsky was applicable in cinema and gave out-
standing results. Romm, together with the remarkable actor
Shchukin, succeeded in creating a portrayal of Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin worthy of the leader, because their work was very different
from the usual work on a role in films. Rehearsals, the breaking
down of the part, the search for various devices — all this was
done in a way more usual in the theatre than in films.

There is another point of interest — Shchukin, who was an actor
of the theatre, not only understood the laws of cinematography,
he also introduced a good deal of film technique into his work on
the stage. He always declared that there were no two separate
arts here, but one great art of acting, which, however, demanded
more mastery and ability and was more agonizing and compli-
cated in the cinema than in the theatre.

The Vassiliev brothers' film Chapaev was a genuine and very
fruitful experiment in film art.

Chapaev became a favourite hero, one of the dearest and most
living of all the characters created by the Soviet cinema. In
portraying Chapaev, the Vassilievs revealed a man of the people,
endowed with the common traits that made him akin to everyone
of the masses and with the charm of a highly gifted individuality.
A clear-cut dynamic individuality, supremely courageous, full of
humour, resourcefulness and brilliance.

In what precisely is the power and success of this experiment?
Wherein lies its expressiveness? Above all in the dramatic con-
struction of the screenplay. The former carpenter Chapaev, hero,
military leader and strategist who conquered Kolchak's comman-
ders, is presented without adulation, truthfully and from many
angles. Everything in him is contradictory. His portrayal is
composed of contradictions, and in spite of this, it is as monolithic
as the sturdiest alloy. He is identical with the people, in features
they are twins — Chapaev and his followers, his followers and the
mighty multinational Soviet people.

This close tie between a national leader and the nation itself
was also revealed in M. Romm's films about Lenin and in Michael
Chiaureli's picture The Vow. The Voiv is a film about a leader and

166

THE SOVIET FILM

the people. This picture, released in 1946, shows that the fire of
inspiration has not paled or weakened in the Soviet cinema. The
film posed new problems before the cinema and found new solu-
tions. It covers a vast historical epoch, telling a story about great
labours and about the achievements of the Soviet people, about
the vow made by Joseph Stalin on the death of the great Vladimir
Lenin and about the way in which this vow was fulfilled. Chiau-
reli's film displaces all existing ideas about genres and standards.
It is an epic legend, a sharp satire, a fiery pamphlet about enemies
and a sincere story of simple Soviet people.

Like a truly great artist, Chiaureli probed deeply into history,
established a unity in periods and dates boldly, and created an
original experimental picture, based on the rich material of
history and publicity, and on a lyrical interpretation of events. I
think that many a director will now turn to similar themes. It is
sufficient to compare this film with, say, any biographical film
made in Hollywood, to appreciate the tremendous power of The
Vow which is, after all, also a biographical film.

Why is Chiaureli's film so convincing and powerful?

It is not the biography of a single man, Stalin. Nor is it the
biography of the single family whose fortunes are connected with
the events depicted. It is the biography of an entire nation, of a
great family, one of whose members is Stalin.

A problem of this kind could only be solved by new means, only
by finding a new way of establishing the interrelation between the
general and the particular in cinema. Events had to be connected
in a new way, episodes had to be joined together differently. It
should be added that Chiaureli came to make this film after
travelling along road as artist-experimenter. He tried his
strength in a pamphleteering film (Habarda), in an heroic film
(Georgii Saakadze) and in national romanticism (Arcen). Only
because of his great versatility was Chiaureli able to accomplish
his tremendous plan in The Vow.

In this film the national leader is seen out in the wind-swept
steppes, near the gaily shimmering waters of deep canals, in
blossoming orchards; he is watched by the kindly, intelligent eyes
of Soviet people. The first tractor arrives in the Red Square and
Stalin is seen at its wheel, then a mass of tractors in the fields — all
this is a song in pictorial montage about the fulfilment of a

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THE SOVIET FILM

people's dream. Stalin talking to Petrova, the mother of a worker's
family, is her son, her brother and her father. He is simple and
understanding, and he is very attentive to this 6trong, grey-
haired woman. This meeting begins a complicated phase of
montage, it leads to a complex pattern of episodes and separate
scenes: a tremor of alarm, premonitions, the faith and strength
which make the Soviet people invincible, and, finally, the triumph
of victory, when, in beautiful combined photography, the banners
of the defeated enemy fall at the mother's feet, the walls of a hall
in the Kremlin part, and the footsteps of this woman, walking
past the people assembled on the day of victory, ring with the
pathos of a joyous march. Stalin, kissing the hand of this grey-
haired woman who has borne her grief through the storms and
stresses of our times, has a son's affection for her as a wise mother.

The pamphlet-style scenes of the film have edge and comedy.
Bonnet! But we shall not digress by examining details. Oh, this
Bonnet! What powers of survival he has. We may yet meet
frequently with personages of this kind who poison fife. Chiaureli
was able to pin him down, what with his telephones, secretaries,
mistresses, his inexhaustible, unendurable, arrogant and vulgar
deceit which leads to bloodshed, war and betrayal.

In Chiaureli's serious and even grim picture there are sparks of
humour and often there is a passing smile, for without them the
film would not be complete.

Our public likes laughter. It is happy when gay, comedy scenes
are projected onto the screens of our picture theatres. The Soviet
cinema has done a particularly large amount of experimenting in
the production of comedies, and this was indispensable. For it
was film comedy that had established the empty, stereotyped and
superficial stock characters, who automatically repeated standard
tricks in one film after another. A great deal has been done by the
Soviet masters Pyriev and Alexandrov, who are striving to
extricate musical comedy from its vapid, 'caramel' atmosphere
and to develop serious themes and genuine artistry in this joyous
and dynamic genre of film.

Pyriev's work is particularly interesting in this connection. His
pictures They Met in Moscow and Tractor Drivers bear very little
resemblance to American or European films of this type. These
musical comedies are full of funny scenes and comic situations,

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THE SOVIET FILM

but laughter is not their sole aim. Pyriev's comedies present the
new Soviet man as joyous and daring, they reveal facets of his
nature which are frequently left in the shade in 'serious' films.
Like Dovzhenko's films, but by means of a different artistic
approach, Pyriev's comedies speak of man's right to happiness,
the attainment of which, in his native country, is not hindered by
any national or class distinctions.

And Alexandrov? Was not his work in breaking down melo-
dramatic conceptions in the film Circus experimental, using as he
did all the possibilities of sound and music to defend pure-
hearted womanhood, and to campaign for national equality and
mutual understanding? Indeed, one of the songs, 'Vast is my
Native Land', composed for the film by Dunaevsky, is often
sung as an anthem. And it is this song which has become the
signature tune of our Moscow radio station. Yet it might have
seemed that it was just a little song from a musical film.

To produce comedies upholding human dignity, comedy depict-
ing some aspect of the many-faceted world of Soviet people, to
create merriment without stupidity and opposing the stupidity
which has become a criterion of taste — these are the broad aims
of our experimenters in musical films.

Lack of space makes it impossible for me to touch even briefly
on all the problems of experiment in the Soviet cinema. Our life
presents us with new demands every day.

So we try to sharpen and deepen our artistry. The State itself —
and that means the people — invites us to experiment. It does not
seek to lead the arts along a beaten track. It wants cinemato-
graphy with a capital G, sparing neither effort nor expense to
attain this end. That is why, for instance, it was in Moscow that
the only Film Actors' Theatre so far existing in the world was
established — a theatre with a large company of actors and a
number of art directors' studios, a theatre which should serve as
a breeding-ground for creative ideas and a springboard for daring
quests.

We are deeply convinced that this experiment — an experiment
involving actors, directors, designers, composers and screen-
writers— will contribute towards a series of new conquests, both
in the cinema and the theatre. It may well bring into being
various new genres which often originate from the actor who,

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THE SOVIET FILM

working in the conditions of this theatre, really will have a chance
to find himself, to try out his strength, to discover his own
approach and to establish himself.

Of course the Film Actors' Theatre should be discussed sepa-
rately, in a separate article. I have mentioned it here only in
connection with the general problems of experiment in the Soviet
cinema.

I have said nothing about experiment in scientific films and
have touched only on one or two examples of documentary and
cartoon films.

I should like to say in conclusion that the whole of the Soviet
cinema is filled with the spirit of experiment, and that essentially
the majority of our pictures present new problems which are
solved in a new way, both technically and creatively.

(Translated by Catherine de la Roche)

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SOVIET DOCUMENTARY

BY ROMAN KARMEN

IN this article I should like to recall the whole story of
Soviet documentary cinematography. Nor could it be otherwise,
for in the history of the documentary film in our country there has
never been a stage which was not marked by bold experiment,
persistent searching, impassioned discussion and innovation.

In our work we Soviet artists have always striven to make our
productions near and understandable to the millions of our spec-
tators, to stir their better feelings and noble emotions. We have
endeavoured to make films that would satisfy the constantly
rising cultural and aesthetic standards of the Soviet people; films
pregnant with meaning and artistic in form, reflecting the most
vital problems of the life, culture and strivings of our people.

Experiment which leaves no trace in art, which does not extend
beyond the bounds of formalistic manipulation — such a kind of
experiment is unworthy of recollection when one is dealing with
truly great art. For, indisputably, the documentary cinema has
long ago won an important place among the arts.

I should like to talk of the fruitful creative quests which have
determined the growth of our documentary cinema, the daring
innovations, the search for new genres and styles, and, also, of the
organizational measures which aided the growth and formation of
the art of documentary film in the USSR.

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SOVIET DOCUMENTARY

Birth of the Soviet Documentary Cinema

The Soviet documentary cinema was the first cinematography
of revolutionary Russia. It was born in the fire of the revolution
and the civil war, and from its first steps it placed itself firmly and
unequivocally at the service of the people's interests.

The few pictures of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, recording for ever
the vivid image of the leader of the socialist revolution, were
taken in those years. Lenin attached great importance to the
cinema. We film workers remember his words: 'Of all the arts, the
most important is the cinema.' And during the first years of the
revolution Lenin paid particular attention to the actuality film
and its organizing possibilities. At that time Soviet Russia was a
military camp — civil war, intervention, destruction, famine. The
fighting fronts and the rear were indivisible. Capitalist Russia had
left an inheritance of a few makeshift studios, a limited number of
antediluvian cameras, very little celluloid. In these historical
days the masters of Russia's young cinematography, working
tirelessly in very hard conditions, filmed the battles of the civil
war, the towns and villages where the people were heroically
restoring the country's economy, their struggle against famine.
They filmed the heroism of the Soviet people defending their
native land against enemies who were armed to the teeth.

That is how Soviet cinematography was born.

Dziga Vertov - 'Kino-Eyes'

During the first years of our cinema, there appeared a group of
enthusiasts of documentary headed by Dziga Vertov. Vertov and
his colleagues undoubtedly played a big progressive role in the
history of the Soviet cinema. They called themselves 'Kino-eyes'.
Much in their thunderous ultra-left declarations of that time now
6eems naive and is liable to call forth a smile from Vertov himself —
now a grey-haired man with an energetic profile, who continues
his work as director in the Central Documentary Film Studio.

'The world of the kino-eyes . . .' Army of the film-observers of
life . . . Away with 'factories of grimaces' — the studios of acted

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SOVIET DOCUMENTARY

films . . . Life caught unawares . . . These slogans and declara-
tions were one side of the kino-eyes' activity, the theoretical
basis, so to speak, of their work in the first years of the revolution.
In their manifesto about 'disbanding feature cinematography' in
1919 they threatened to destroy the feature film, to wipe it off the
face of the earth, and proclaimed an epoch of the 'cinematography
of facts'. This was a delusion, a tribute to the spirit of the times,
when even the young Mayakovsky, who was to become a great
realist poet and interpreter of our epoch, was searching for an out-
let for his turbulent creative energy in futuristic extravagances.
The importance of the kino-eyes' work was not in this, but in
the fact that they were tirelessly filming life in all its diversity and
regularly producing issues of the newsreel Kino-Pravda, thus
developing documentary cinematography. In those years, refer-
ring to Vertov's work, the newspaper Pravda wrote: 'this experi-
mental work, which has grown out of the process of the proletar-
ian revolution, is a great step towards the creation of a really
proletarian cinema'.

In the experiments of the kino-eyes there was, of course, a good
deal of merely formalistic twisting and turning. But the courage
to open new paths, the search for undiscovered means of depicting
life expressively through the camera — these are undoubted merits
of the kino-eyes and their director Vertov.

The new alphabet of film shots was born in the research and
experiments which, when they did not follow a purely formalistic
fine, and when combined, helped to reflect life more fully and
widely. The kino-eyes 'rejected' the standard speed of filming,
which was then generally used — 16 frames. They slowed down the
camera when they wished to stress the rapidity of an object's
movement. They fixed the camera to motor-cycles, locomotives,
buffers of trains, thus obtaining the most unusual shots, filmed in
movement. The kino-eye cameramen, in their pursuit of extra-
ordinary angles, climbed on to the cornices of houses and on to
radio-masts, suspended themselves by their belts from the hooks
of cranes. They were the first to make enlarged close-ups; to fix
microscopes to the camera; they developed the method of stop-
ping the movement and holding a shot on the screen and the
technique of dynamic montage, completely new at the time,
which was subsequently introduced also into feature films.

173

SOVIET DOCUMENTARY

The kino-eyes were the initiators of the chronicle or historical
film. Already in those early years, Vertov and his comrades made
Five Years of Struggle and Victories and the film in 13 parts
History of the Civil War. They put forward a plan, which at that
time seemed unrealizable, to create a central all-Russia 'Film
Factory of Facts' — a central studio for the production of all kinds
of documentary films. Soon this plan did become reality, and
Vertov himself did a good deal to bring it into being. He created
an entire series of films entitled Kino-Eye which were widely
discussed far beyond the borders of our land and had many
imitators in all countries.

The Soviet documentalists had followers in many countries,
who, it is true, were not always able to discover the rational core
of the 'Kino-Eye' experiments and often adopted only the ex-
ternal part of their methods. These were the Avant-Garde group
in France, the director Cavalcanti, Ruttmann, who created his
film Symphony of a Great City in Germany, Ivens in Holland, Jean
Lods in France. In England the Association of Realist Film Pro-
ducers came into being. The work of the Soviet documentalists
influenced many directors of feature films in our own country and
in many countries of Europe. The 'alphabet' of the documental-
ists, their methods of montage, unusual angles, close-ups, were
adopted in acted films. Many tended to see the influence of the
documentary in the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Room and
other masters of feature cinematography.

The Full-Length Films of Esvir Shub

A new and very interesting step in the development of the Soviet
documentary cinema were the films by director Esvir Shub,
compiled from newsreel documents, Russia of Nicholas II and
Leo Tolstoi, Fall of the Romanov Dynasty and Great Road. With
these films the documentary cinema summed up, as it were, its
entire creative experience of the past years, and came out on to
the highway of full-length productions. The first was an eloquent
and convincing recreation of the spirit of the epoch and the milieu
in which the great Russian writer Tolstoi spent the last years of

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his life, and acquainted the spectator with the atmosphere of
Czarist arbitrariness in the period of the wildest reaction. Fall of
the Romanov Dynasty, second in the series, was a vivid and
successful attempt to convert some scrappy material taken on the
off-chance into a moving epic, giving a clear and brilliant picture
of the epoch. In this film Esvir Shub went beyond the borders of
Czarist Russia and used documentary material to show the whole
capitalist world and the motive forces of the Russian revolution.
These films, together with Great Road, had great success with
mass audiences, and put an end, once and for all, to the argument
whether or not documentary could compete with the feature film
in wide commercial distribution, whether or not it was liked by
audiences.

These were the years when our people set out to realize the
grandiose plans for the industrialization of our country — the first
five-year plans of the building of socialism in the USSR.

The First Five-Year Plans on the Screen

Documentary cinematography was faced with a complicated and
honourable task — to record for history the extraordinary trans-
formations which rapidly altered the face of our fatherland, turn-
ing a backward agrarian country into a country with great
industries, collective farming and a high culture. It was essential
that large numbers of cameramen-directors be attracted into the
cinema. A stronger technical basis and quantities of equipment
were needed for a coverage on so vast a scale. A great deal of
assistance was required from the Government if the problems of
technique and personnel were to be solved. The documentalists'
old dream of a large studio of their own, of a wide network of
film correspondents covering the entire country, became reality.

A broad stream of fresh energy poured into the documentary
cinema. Young people, who had been studying in the camera-
men's and directors' faculties of the State Institute of Cinema
joined the documentalists willingly. The young cameramen were
attracted by the romance of the complicated expeditions to the
distant outposts of our vast country. They longed to see and feel

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the first manifestations of a new life, to make film records of a
great transfiguration, of man's struggle with nature, of the
realization of the great plans which had hitherto seemed an
impossible dream.

There was not a spot on the map of the Soviet Union to which
Soviet documentary cameramen did not go. They went with the
first prospecting parties to the Ural steppes, to the sultry sands of
Kara-Kum, to the isolated corners of the Far Eastern Taiga, to
the shores of the Arctic Ocean, to the Pamir Mountains, to the
locations of new towns, gigantic industrial plants, grandiose dams
and hydro -electric stations — to all the places where, together
with the buildings, new Soviet people were growing up, where a
grim struggle was moulding a new socialist type of man, creator
of a new life.

The young units of our documentary cinema had to keep apace
with life, constantly maintaining contact with its mighty heart-
beats. More, they had to be in the vanguard with creative ideas
that would anticipate life's urgent tempo.

This life made it necessary for our films to reflect not only the
external phenomena, but also their content — those powerful
factors which determined the transformation of our country.
Primarily they were determined by a fundamental change in the
Soviet people — the active builders of socialism, by the dynamic
growth of their culture and political consciousness. 'The reality of
our programme is the living people', Stalin said. Expressive
portraits of living people appeared in documentary films.

We endeavoured to show these people in their dynamic growth,
to show their deeds and achievements at work and at home.
Sketches of real people as independent films and as subjects
within full-length documentaries became the dominant style of
our work. This was not an easy task. But we never departed from
our main principles of strict documentation. We did not take the
dangerous course of staging scenes, or making people hold forth
in front of the camera. No, in our films the spectator saw living
people who had been filmed in their usual surroundings.

To achieve our aim of creating human portraits we drew upon
our rich newsreel archives, which enabled us to make biographical
sketches. We could show the growth of a man who had come to a
factory from a village and eventually became director of the

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factory; or the different stages in the life of a blast furnace crafts-
man who became minister of metallurgy; or the life story of a girl
tractor driver, whose name became famous throughout our
country.

The genre of the biographical documentary was also developed
in full-length films about the outstanding people of our country.
Director Bubrik made major films about Gorki and Mayakovsky.
Films were also made about Kuybyshev, Kirov, Orjonikidze and
Academician Pavlov.

The documentary film as an active participant of
Socialist construction. The First Film Train in the
World

Among the most noteworthy innovations in our work were the
travelling film editorial laboratories sent to each of the major
construction enterprises in various parts of our country. This is
how it was done: units of documentary film workers — several
cameramen, the director, the editor, the cutter and the laboratory
assistant — went to an important construction, established them-
selves there, having organized a small laboratory, cutting room
and printing machine for the titles. The task of these mobile
laboratories was to give the workers on the construction active
help by issuing film magazines regularly. These films were devoted
to the most vital interests of the construction itself. They propa-
gandized the latest methods of building, laying concrete, assem-
bling equipment. They showed the achievements of individual
pioneers, and mercilessly exposed the failures and delays observed
in one or other of the departments. In these magazines you could
see film reporting of the most different kinds: the feuilleton, brief
notice, leading article, character study, portrait, satire. By adopt-
ing this new method the newsreel-makers were putting into
practice Lenin's famous words about newspapers. He said: 'The
newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and agitator, it is
also a collective organizer.' The mobile cutting rooms had a great
influence on the history of our actuality film. While performing
the role of 'collective organizer,' they played another important
part — that of systematically recording all the stages of the

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country's construction. This was the beginning of organized
historical recording in film. The record now consists of millions of
metres of film. In this history, arranged on shelves in film vaults,
are the 'biographies' of such giants as the Magnitogorsk metal-
lurgical combine and the Dnieper hydroelectric station. These
are biographies in the real meaning of the word — from the day of
the giant's birth, from the first explosions of ammonite on the
barren shores of the Dnieper to the exciting moment when the
grandiose turbines were first set in motion and the meter indicator
recorded its first tremor — from the first prospecting parties, camp-
ing in a tent at the foot of Magnitny Mountain, and the people
digging the first excavations in frost and snowstorms to the first
piece of metal obtained and the aerial panorama showing the
greatest metallurgical combine in the world, surrounded by a
town which, only a few years ago, was not marked on any map.

The mobile laboratories, fully justified in practice, served as a
stimulus for a new experimental enterprise — the kine-train. This
was a film studio on wheels. The coaches were equipped with film
laboratories, cutting tables, projection room, a typography and a
photographic laboratory. Two of the coaches had compartments
which were the living- quarters of the directors,l aboratory
assistants and cameramen. There were also a kitchen and dining-
room. For several years, this original documentary film studio
made expeditions all over the country.

The train would arrive on the scene of a major construction,
stay there for a long period and perform the same task as the
travelling newsreel laboratories. In addition to film magazines,
the unit issued a newspaper and an illustrated gazette. The workers
from the construction would come to the projection room to see
the documentaries produced in the train. After completing an
important job of cultural propaganda in one district, the train
would go on to do the same work at the other end of the country.
The material filmed by this kine-train, its various shorts and
magazines, now have exceptional historical value.

Then came sound, the mighty new element in provoking the
spectator's emotional response. The first recording machines were
designed by the Soviet inventor, engineer Shorin. The documen-
talists immediately mastered the technique. Real noises, recorded
in the streets, railway stations, sports stadiums and among

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crowds of demonstrators — the actual voices, laughter and singing
of Soviet people were heard in the first documentary sound films.
How broad and completely new were the perspectives which
opened up before us in those days !

At that time Dziga Vertov made the first full-length document-
ary sound film about the Donbas miners. He went down the mines
with his recording equipment, recording the genuine industrial
noises and human conversation. Charlie Chaplin, who saw the film
at the time, wrote: 'I regard the film Enthusiasm as one of the most
moving symphonies I have ever heard. Dziga Vertov is a musician.
Professors should learn from him instead of arguing with him.'

The Central Studio of Documentary Films

Perhaps the most important 'experiment', the greatest step to-
wards innovation in the history of our documentary cinema, was
the creation of the Central Studio of Documentary Films in
Moscow. I should like to deal in greater detail with the work of
the first documentary film studio in the world, because its exist-
ence was a tremendous stimulus in the growth and formation of
our art.

The Central Studio now occupies a large building in the centre
of Moscow. Its staff, including the technical personnel, numbers
700 people. The permanent staff consists of 30 directors, 93
cameramen, 36 editors, 30 cutters. The greatest writers and
journalists participate in the studio's work. It produces about 20
full-length feature documentaries yearly, the newsreel News of
the Day is issued every six days, and, in addition, there is a large
number of special issues and separate films devoted to outstand-
ing events. The laboratories process some 18,000 metres of film
daily.

If we glance at a map of the Soviet Union, showing the various
points where the correspondents of our studio are operating, we
can see to what dimensions the work of the documentary film has
grown in our country. Every day dozens of cameramen dispatch
their films by train or aircraft to Moscow. These films reflect life
in every district and region of the country. But this map does not

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only indicate the points covered by the correspondents and
cameramen — many towns have independent documentary film
studios. Among them are Leningrad, Kiev, Alma Ata, Novosi-
birsk, Ufa, Kuybyshev, Tashkent, Ashkhabad, Minsk, Tallin,
Riga, Khabarovsk, Stalinabad, Tbilisi, Baku. These studios issue
independent kine-magazines and documentary films, and over
certain subjects for the Central Studio.

Documentary film art is loved and has been recognized by our
audiences of many millions. There can be no doubt that our films
would not have won the spectators' appreciation if we, the
creative workers, had not perfected our techniques and methods,
if we had not produced pictures satisfying the growing cultural
and aesthetic demands of our audiences.

The Cameraman as the Recorder of an Epoch.
Not Dispassionate Reporting, but thoughtful Film
Journalism

A distinctive and, in some ways, a pioneering characteristic of
the Soviet cameraman, is his thoughtful approach to his subject-
matter. His aim is not merely to fix life's external manifestations
on to film. The Soviet cameraman sets himself the complicated
task of revealing the meaning of events. Our cameramen have to
master the technique of continuity. They do not forget the diffi-
culties of editing which confront the director who organizes the
material they have filmed. They do not only film what is happen-
ing, but also why it happened. Their work is no dispassionate
reporting, it is an intelligent form of film journalism, which
enables them to create genuinely artistic films about events and
individual people.

In these films, facts are not presented as incidental or private
things. They reveal the meaning of the grandiose events taking
place in the country, they are perceived as links in a chain of other
facts and events, forming themselves into entire sections of our
new fife. Needless to say, there are the more powerful and
talented masters, and those who are less so. But I am referring to
the majority of cameramen and to the ideal professional type,

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characteristic of our documentary cinematography. I am talking
of the standard aimed at by the beginners among our young
cameramen.

I want to name the leading masters who have many documen-
ary productions to their credit. They are the directors Poselsky,
Varlamov, Stepanova, Bubrik, Belyaev, Kopalin, Boikov, Svil-
ova, Kiselev, Venger, Ovanesova, Slutzky and others.

A whole army of Soviet cameramen has grown up, perfecting
their craftsmanship every year. The cameramen Belyakov, Esh-
urin, Troyanovsky, Uchitel, Mazruho, Krichevsky, Ochurkov,
Dobronitzky, Semenov, Haluchakov, Mikosha, Statland, Vichrev,
Sofyin, Fomin, Ivanov, Glider, Shafran, Levitan, Lebedev, Sher,
Lytkin, Monglovsky and others — this is only a small part of a
large army, these are only a few of our aces, fully accomplished
artists, who in many years' work have mastered every branch of
film reporting.

Creation of Cinematographic Science

It seems to me that one of the significant experiments which has
been entirely justified in our cinematography, was the establish-
ment of the All- Union Institute of Cinematography, which be-
came a vast reservoir of young creative forces going into pro-
duction. The experiment consisted in the fact that this Institute
became the foundation for the creation of cinematographic
science, which had not existed hitherto. The creation of this
Institute gave the impetus for a summing up of the experience of
many years, the writing of scientific works, the establishment of
a theoretical basis, without which no technique or art can exist.
The best forces in our cinema, the leading directors and camera-
men, were attracted by this scientific work and confronted with
the necessity to formulate the knowledge gained by them in order
to pass it on to the younger workers. The documentary film
faculty played an enormous part in producing a large number of
masters of the documentary cinema, who came into production,
possessing a broad cultural education which they could extend in
the day to day process of filming.

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'A Day in the New World': Maxim Gorki's Idea on
the Screen

One of the noteworthy experiments of the Soviet documentary
cinema was the attempt to put on to the screen the great Russian
writer, Maxim Gorki's, idea for a documentary book A Day in
the World. Gorki had suggested observing an ordinary day on our
planet and compiling the results of the observation, such as notes,
reviews of the press, sketches, articles, etc., all dealing with the
same day, in a book. We decided to adapt the writer's idea to the
cinema, having, however, reduced its scope to include only our
own country. To make a documentary film about one-sixth of the
world — about a socialist country — would serve as a serious test
for our entire network of correspondents, for the whole of our
documentary cinema and for our cameramen, who would have to
show great resourcefulness, professional skill and an ability to
select the most important and interesting among the events that
would take place on that particular day.

At the Central Studio we established a kind of operational staff
of directors, who worked out a plan for the orientation of the film.
Needless to say, this plan could not define the things that would
be filmed, but it was necessary to guide the isolated efforts of the
cameramen, scattered over the entire country, to ensure that
various localities which did not have permanent correspondents
would be duly covered, to advise each cameraman of the uniform
technique to be employed and supply them with the same raw
stock. Some cameramen were specially commissioned to go to
distant outposts, and there await a signal. When everything was
ready, we chose our day. We simply stuck a finger on to the
calendar — it turned out to be the most ordinary working day —
August 24th, 1940.

All cameramen received a laconic telegram: 'Film August 24th'.
It was a day of enormous tension. Our 'Staff H.Q.' received tele-
grams from Central Asia, Georgia, the Far East; radiograms came
in from aircraft, ships, from isolated encampments on the archi-
pelagos of the Arctic Ocean, from the collective farms of Ukraine,
from the spas of the Caucasus, from army camps, from the Kara-
Kum desert, from Leningrad, Minsk, from frontier posts, from
factories and plants. Ten cameramen filmed Moscow from dawn

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to nightfall. We followed the radio news bulletins, and sent tele-
grams to our cameramen: 'Such and such an event is taking place
in your sector — unless you have filmed it, please do so.'

On the following day the material began to arrive at the Central
Studio by train, aircraft or special courier. It was developed
immediately, and in the small projection room we saw the im-
mensity of the Soviet Union unfold before our eyes — its factories,
steppes, mountains, seas, hundreds of portraits of remarkable
people working, resting, studying or at home. It was an exceed-
ingly complicated task to select from these thousands of metres
of film the most interesting and characteristic pictures of our
country's life.

The film edited from this material turned out to be very
interesting. We called it A Day in the New World. Despite the
kaleidoscopic quality of the material, we managed to compile a
shapely and unified story of the country's life, its people and their
occupations. This film subsequently received a Stalin prize, was
shown in many countries and had great success with the spectator.

This experiment laid the foundation for a whole series of
similar films, based on the same principle. During the war, the
documentary A Day of War was made, reflecting the country's
mighty effort in its struggle with the German invaders. It included
coverages of all the fighting fronts from Sebastopol to the Arctic
Ocean, and of all the industrial regions in the rear. Finally, since
the war, another film entitled A Day in a Victorious Country has
been made, this time in colour. This film, too, depicts the entire
country, the work of millions of people, restoring the ruins, build-
ing anew, carrying out the great programme of the post-war five
year plan. I think this will not be the last film in the series.

Soviet Documentary Cinematography in the War
Years

From the first hours, after fascist Germany treacherously invaded
our peaceful country, we film reporters became military men.
Cameramen were in the forward lines of fire on every sector of the
front. In the fullest meaning of the word, they were soldiers,

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armed with a camera. They followed the infantry on foot, filming
them as they went in to attack, they flew over enemy territory,
filming the bombing, they filmed the strafing of German columns
from diving 'Stormoviks', they took pictures on the warships of
the Baltic, Black and North Seas and on submarines. They went
into attack, sitting with their cameras inside tanks, made para-
chute landings on to enemy territory, filmed and fought with the
partisans of Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Baltic territories.

Our cameramen were among the last detachments of troops to
leave the heroic towns of Odessa and Sebastopol. They fought on
the outskirts of Moscow and at Stalingrad. The cameramen of
Leningrad did not abandon their beloved city when it was
blockaded. Exhausted by hunger and privations, they filmed the
heroic defence of Leningrad, day in day out, during the 900 days
and nights of the siege, constantly under artillery fire and air
bombing. When the Red Army began its broad offensive, the
cameramen were again in the front ranks. They were among the
first to rush into the liberated towns, they accompanied the first
soldiers and tanks that crossed the German frontier, they stormed
Berlin and filmed the hoisting of the red flag of victory over the
Reichstag.

Many of our friends died a hero's death on the battlefields.
Many perished with the partisans. Often cameramen had to
exchange their cameras for an automatic or a grenade. Even in the
last days of the street fighting in Berlin, when it had become clear
that only a few blocks of houses and a few hours separated the
men from victory, the cameramen were in the thick of the fight-
ing, facing death. In many European towns you can find modest
tombstones, always decorated with fresh flowers, with the in-
scription: 'Newsreel cameraman so-and-so died a hero's death
during the liberation of our town.' We will always remember the
glorious names of our comrades in arms, who gave their lives for
the great cause of liberating the people of the world from fascist
tyranny.

Our documentary cinema produced many pictures recording
the achievements of the Soviet people in the second world war.
Many of these films have been seen the whole world over. They
include The Defeat of the Germans Near Moscow, Stalingrad,
Leningrad Fights, Battle of Orel, Battle of Ukraine, Liberation of

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Byelorussia, Berlin and Defeat of Japan, In making them the
cameramen and directors used the entire wealth of technique,
methods and experience built up in the Soviet documentary
cinema. These are films about one event or one battle, and at the
same time they are films about the heroes of the battle, about the
entire Soviet people, standing behind these heroes. Through
particular facts they revealed the general characteristics of the
Soviet country, its ideology and outlook on life.

More than three million metres of film were taken at the front.
Hundreds of magazines and special issues, devoted to one or other
military operation, were made by our Central Documentary Film
Studio. During the war many feature film directors joined the
documentary cinema. Some remarkable documentaries were
created by the feature film directors Alexander Dovzhenko,
Yuli Raizman, Sergei Yutkevich, and co-directors Heifitz and
Zarchi.

'Judgement of the Nations'

The last in thes eries of documentary war films, though made
since the war, was Judgement of the Nations. This film about the
trial by the International Military Tribunal of the chief German
war criminals, was a summing up of what the peoples of the world
had endured during the war as a result of German fascism. This
film was experimental in the very principles according to which
the material was organized. The film was produced by the author
of this article, who, for a year, supervised the filming of the
Nuremberg trials.

The foundation on which the film was constructed, was the idea
of illustrating the speeches of the accusers with genuine docu-
mentary material revealing the monstrous crimes of German
fascism and its leaders. Before this film was edited, tens of
thousands of metres of German newsreels were examined, includ-
ing some secret coverages made by the Germans in the occupied
parts of the USSR. In addition we made considerable use of film
documents produced by the military cameramen of the Soviet
and Allied Forces, which depicted Nazi atrocities, their death

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camps and the barren deserts to which they reduced formerly
flourishing regions of our country during their retreat.

When, during the interrogations, the Nazi leaders tried to
resist, confuse the issue or He, the screen would play its part as
chief witness for the prosecution. Various episodes were projected
showing the sinking by the Germans of civilian vessels in neutral
waters, the ghastly scenes when masses of Soviet people were
driven away to slavery, robbery, insolence and derision, the mass
graves, the crematoriums, the heaps of gold tooth stoppings in the
vaults of the Reichsbank, the monstrous camps of death. The
pictures of the accused seated in the dock were alternated with
pictures of the same men, covered in medals at the time of their
rule, delivering speeches, participating in parades and in night
orgies.

The last scenes of the film showed these people after they had
been executed, with ropes round their necks. A profound, philo-
sophical lesson of history. 'Let future aggressors remember it',
concluded the commentator.

Soviet Documentary Cinematography after the War

More than two years separate us from the day when the sun rose
on a victorious world. Tens of thousands of towns and villages are
wiped off the face of the earth, devastated factories, mines, power
stations; earth torn by metal, still pregnant with the bitter odour
of war, languishing uncultivated . . .

The Soviet people set to work, restoring the ruin, liquidating
the heavy consequences of war. Peasants and engineers, tractor
drivers and academicians of architecture, shepherds and sculp-
tors, writers and metal turners, agronomists and textile workers,
young folk and old — the great Soviet working family devoted
itself to carrying out the plans for restoring the national economy.
Is not this a fruitful theme for the documentary cinema? The
great plans for reconstructing our country could not fail to be
reflected in the plans for the work of the documentalists. We
approached our task with tremendous enthusiasm and creative
fire. Many films have already been completed by our directors,

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hundreds of thousands of metres have already been filmed by our
cameramen. But every day we see that many aspects of life in our
country have not yet been reflected in documentary, and with
renewed energy we apply ourselves to the mastery of new themes.

In all our work, as before the war, our hero is Soviet man,
rising to his full stature — the builder, creator, innovator and
enthusiast.

It seems to me that Intelligentsia of the Ural Machine Factory
by director Boikov and Masters of Great Harvests by Vasili
Belyaev are particularly characteristic as expert portrayals of
human beings in the films of the post war period. I single them out
because the most arduous theme for documentary — the depiction
of living people — has been very successfully treated in these
films, and this, as I have already said, is the 'general line' of
our creative work. The first film portrays the engineers, techni-
cians and constructors of a large factory in a very interesting and
entertaining manner. You see them at work and in private life.
The factory itself, its gigantic workshops, and the complicated
production processes serve as a background for a meticulous and,
it must be said, a talented depiction of the people, their charac-
ters, biographies and personal destinies.

Masters of Great Harvests, by the gifted director Vasili Belyaev,
is exceedingly interesting from the point of view of creative
technique. In this film Belyaev adopted the method of long-term
observation. The object of the observation is an average collective
farm. The cameramen who kept it under observation, also spent
long periods in other villages, 'watching' through the camera
several characters concerned in collective farm life and recording
the hard and the joyful moments of the general struggle for a
good harvest. The theme of the film is the struggle for the post-
war revival of agriculture, the fight for a rich harvest. And though
the film does not include a single 'staged' episode, it is full of
tension, it grips the spectator with its complex drama. The
dramatic episodes of elemental disasters — rainstorms, locusts,
droughts — the peoples' struggle for maximum yields of grain,
sugar beet, cotton and flax produce a more powerful impression
on the spectator than any psychological drama with a contrived
adventure plot. This is a great triumph for the director, reaffirm-
ing the documentary cinema as a great art in its own right.

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However, the discussions about documentary as an indepen-
dent art have long ago been finished with. Life and the talented
productions which have had genuine success with the public, have
had the last word in this discussion. Yes, it is a great art. Its
possibilities are unbounded, its heights unattained. The ways of
developing the documentary cinema are manifold and complex.
For this reason the people who have dedicated their lives to it are
not content with what has been achieved, they do not rest on
their laurels, but always look forward, and only forward.

The mighty pulse of life in our socialist fatherland and its
wonderful rhythm have always enriched our creative work. Now
they inspire us to create new works, worthy of the great epoch of
creation, the epoch of building communism in our country.
(Translated by Catherine de la Roche)

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EXPANSION OF THE GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN FIL

BY ERNST IROS

all that the film has become and the standard which it had
reached in the relatively short period of 40 years (until 1935) is
due to its pioneer artists and technicians. They had the courage
to deviate again and again from the well-worn path of routine and
stereotyped pattern, and to struggle against doubtful and super-
ficial 'experience', which was not really experience, and to give
the lie to the misleading assertions of the box-office returns.
Through smaller or larger experiments the pioneers discovered
the language of the film and the means of expression in this
particular art form. They have given film-making a certain funda-
mental and always fresh experience — experience is based on
experiment — and founded and developed the tradition of film art.
In this sense not only do the avant-garde films deserve to be
described as experiments, but all films which are artistically and
technically significant in content and form.

The German film was fortunate in that prominent artists early
associated themselves with it. Because of their abilities and
authority they could get their own way against the unimaginative
commercial-mindedness of most producers who, instead of guid-
ing the taste of the public with good films, wanted their films to
comply with its alleged bad taste. It is due to these artists and the
strength of their convictions that the sterility of mass production
did not result in a fateful levelling down of the German film.

The first significant experiment which surpassed the already
numerous German attempts was The Student of Prague, made

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by Paul Wegener in 1913, and remade by Heinrich Galeen in
1925. This film was already capable of full expression and demon-
strated the symbolic values and possibilities of cinematic con-
struction. It was the Faust motif: the man who sells his soul (in
this case his reflection in the mirror) to the devil (a ghost-like old
man). This reflection, now separated from him, drives the man, a
poor student, through the devilish realms of his innermost desires
and yearnings, and leads him to ruin. Lighting created already in
the first, but even more so in the second version, the spectral and
increasingly eerie atmosphere for these magical happenings. This
bold act, the significance of which was not lessened because of the
inadequate technical means of those days and which was in
interpretation still strongly influenced by the theatre, must have
considerably stimulated film production of later years.

With the formation of UFA in 1917 and Emelka towards the
end of 1918 and the erection of their large studios, film production
on a large scale became possible. Besides Heinrich Galeen, artists
of the calibre of, among others, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Wiene,
Lupu Pick, Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, F. W. Murnau, Erich
Pommer, Wilhelm Dieterle, with actors and technicians of equal
importance, were intent on endowing the film with the dignity
and the standing of an art.

Lubitsch created his beautiful picture Dubarry (Passion) then
The Flame and Sumurun in 1918. 1919 brought the expressionist
attempt by Robert Wiene The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; also in 1919
appeared the lavish production Das Grabmal des Maharadscha
(The Maharajah's Tomb)* directed by Gunnar Tollnes, as well as
The Golem (based on the novel by Meyerink), once again a film of
magical symbolism. In the same year Phantom, after Gerhard
Hauptmann, was created. In this film a poor lad was run over by
a beautiful woman's team of white horses which, pursuing him as
a phantom, drives him into the arms of another woman and
finally to crime. It is impossible to forget how the team of white
horses tears around a corner, reappears at another, and its mad
rush from and into all directions; or how the marble top of a table

* Film titles in this essay have been dealt with as follows. The original German title
is given first with a literal translation in brackets. If the film received an English title
under which it was distributed, this title has been put in brackets but also in quotation
marks.

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suddenly begins to spin, dragging the man seated by it and every-
thing on it into its vortex, casting him into the void.

In 1921 appeared Schicksal (Fate), by Fritz Lang; Die Drei-
groschen Oper, by Pabst, with unusual shots and perspectives;
the lavishly produced Emelka film Das Gift der Medici (The
Medici Poison), and the UFA film Katte, which for the first time
showed the raging malevolence of the Prussian King Friederich
Wilhelm, whose victim Katte was the friend of the future
Frederic the Great.

The year 1922 continued the tradition of the fantastic and
supernatural films, which characterized the spiritual confusion of
the post-war period in Germany.

The most significant of these films were Das Leben des Dr.
Mabuse ('Dr. Mabuse') and Der Mude Tod ('Destiny'), both by
Fritz Lang; the latter film with dying candles as a symbol of
death. Das Haus ohne Tur und Fenster (The House without Doors
or Windows) was a miscarried attempt at an expressionist film, a
psychological film which intended to symbolize the contrast
between sickliness and desire for life; and Nosferatu, a symphony
of horror in which, once again, nature and scenery were brought
into a ghostly world of terror.

It was no accident that at the same time, 1921—23, the Nibelun-
gen appeared on the screen, first Siegfrieds Tod ('Death of Sieg-
fried'), then Kriemhilds Rache ('Kriemhild's Revenge'). This 'Song
of Songs' of brute force with the spectacular grandeur of Fritz
Lang's novel and interesting direction, helped in a way to found
not only a new film style, but also that outlook on life which saw
its ideals in mythological epics of malice, deception, hatred and
assassination, of revenge and self-destruction. Had not the hordes
of Nazi Brownshirts begun to manifest this same idea in vendettas
and bloody street fights? To this film style belonged the mass
marches and mass movement, the lavish setting and the combin-
ing of pictorial with cinematic elements. In the review which I
wrote at the time I said: 'It is always the eye of the painter which
is here creative in the best sense'. This style became, as it were,
the typical style of UFA, which had produced both films. Fritz
Lang progressed a step further in the first part, Death of Siegfried,
by stressing the epic treatment and maintaining it throughout.
The epic treatment was not just the frame, but the very basis.

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With that the film had found its own characteristic form. Unfor-
tunately, Lang retracted this step in the second part. Even the
grandeur here became a mere stylized frame, which was an end in
itself rather than an organic part of the whole. The battle scenes
were masterly, but appeared too drawn out and disturbed the
dynamic equilibrium of the film.

To the same class belonged Friedericus Rex, also a UFA film,
which complemented the brave Katte film. This film, beautifully
produced, demonstrated even more sharply the brutality of
the Royal Prussian lust for power, personified by Friedrich
Wilhelm. It showed the haughty militarism of 1730, and the rise
of the even stricter militarism of young Frederic II, setting a bad
example by its alluring and brilliantly constructed scenes. The
film must have been confusing and infectious in its effect on
German minds. It was directed by R. von Cserepy.

Fortunately there were other films of a more constructive
nature: F. W. Murnau made, together with cameraman Fritz
Arno Wagner, the unforgettably beautiful Der Brennende Acker
(Burning Soil). It was disciplined in its direction, and already
showed signs of Murnau's great art. This film was also significant
because of its psychologically faultless execution of the theme.
The film dealt with a man's ruin through his heartless and soulless
ambition. In what must have been his first picture, Geld auf der
Strasse (Money on the Street), Reinhold Schunzel told the story of
a cheat who, for the sake of his child, became addicted to specula-
tion, with admirably restrained and already very realistic methods
of presentation. For a convincing representation of the milieu
Schunzel used original cinematic means of expression.

To this early post-war period also belong the first significant
films with Asta Nielsen. Before that she had already taken part in
what must have been her first important film, Die Weisse Sklavin
(The White Slave), which centred round the problem of human
love. In 1920 she also played Hamlet in a film. Her actual career,
however, began with Erdgeist (Gnome), based on Wedekind, Die
Frau im Feuer (The Woman in the Fire) and Gal genhochzeit (Wedd-
ing on the Gallows). One of the most fascinating scenes occurs when
the daughter of the governor, trying to liberate her lover from
prison, desperately pleads with the seemingly indifferent man in a
more passionate and more gripping manner than any spoken word

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could have done and how, driven by terror, she leads him through
endless corridors. In Absturz (Downfall) she, now as a woman grown
old and ugly, prepares to receive the lover who has served a ten
years' sentence in prison. She is trying to make herself look young
and beautiful but suddenly, with feverish resolution, she wipes off
the deceptive mask. There she stands, ugly once more, and waits
behind a tree by the prison, watching as her man, who has remained
young, comes out and looks for her in vain as she does not reveal
herself. Her most outstanding film, however, was Frdulein Julie
('Miss Julie'), after Strindberg. In it she excelled all her previous
characterizations. That was 35 years ago, but she still stands be-
fore me as if it were yesterday. Kathe Dorsch, Wilhelm Dieterle
and the discreet Arnold Korff took part as well, but none of them
attained Asta Nielsen's filmic acting ability. She seemed to have
been born for the film. The restrained yet deepened power of ex-
pression of her miming and her gestures finally became the style
of film acting. The Danish Asta Nielsen was the most significant
actress of the German silent film.

The rise of the German film continued. It won over the masses
in Germany and was accepted. There followed Ludwig Berger's
Cinderella, Wiene's Raskolnikov, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the
Wise). Each film brought new and surprising forms of presenta-
tion. Karl Grune's Die Strasse ('The Street'), dealt with the novel
theme of a street and its atmosphere and mood at night with
lyrically conceived pictures and unity of style. His film Arabella,
the story of a horse, was also novel in theme as well as in its
sensitive treatment.

The tendency towards the epic treatment and stylisation
continued during 1925 with Fritz Lang's UFA film Metropolis.
The UFA film Der Letzte Mann ('The Last Laugh'), on the other
hand, again brought a new element into German film production.
The scenario of this film had been written by Karl Mayer and,
similar to his Scherben ('Shattered') (1921) was based completely
(without the use of titles and without a love story) on the expres-
sive powers of the film, on the eloquence of careful description of
place and atmosphere, and absorbing characterization. Emil Jan-
nings proved himself already in 1918 to be an outstanding inter-
preter of heavy character parts. In The Last Laugh he portrayed
an old, resplendently uniformed hotel commissionaire, whose

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whole dignity and pride, his very self, are destroyed when, because
of old age, he is rudely deprived of his high office and uniform and
forced to accept the degrading position of a lavatory attendant.
Jannings was incomparable in his downfall, when he, who up to
now had always been respectfully greeted by his neighbours in
the back-street building where he lived, was ridiculed and
derided with pitiless malice. With all the means of a sensitively
used camera and skilfully varied lighting, the life in the hotel, in
the backyard of the tenement building as well as inside it, was
portrayed, and an atmosphere was created which universalised
this collapse of a human being.

In 1924 appeared the Lupu Pick film Sylvester ('New Year's
Eve'), in which the sea was used now as lyrical accompaniment,
now as rhythmical emphasis; a new acting partner was discovered
in this first successful attempt. The film Der Mensch am Scheideweg
(Man at the Cross Roads), made in 1924, might be mentioned
merely because in it — for the first time, as far as I know — Marlene
Dietrich appeared on the screen as a young, very good and very
natural girl.

If The Last Laugh already touched on a social problem, G. W.
Pabst made, in 1925, the first real film of social problems, Die
Freudlose Gasse ('The Joyless Street'), a masterly presentation of
milieu and atmosphere.

In its early days the German film had already shown a marked
tendency to deal with problems, a tendency which was even more
pronounced in the cinema than in the theatre. It was probably
due to the spiritual and moral disintegration of post-war Ger-
many that a disproportionately large number of films dealt with
sexual and social problems, the problems of abortion, heredity,
white slave traffic and prostitution. The majority of these
films, however, owed their existence to the producers' specu-
lation on the baser instincts of the public. There were rela-
tively few serious experiments which attempted to discuss these
problems in a tactful and artistically unobjectionable manner. To
these belonged Das Gefahrliche Alter (The Dangerous Age) (1927)
after the famous novel by Karin Michaelis, one of the last silent
films in which Asta Nielsen displayed her talent for portraying
people in a manner typical of the cinema. She was the 'woman of
40' who succumbed to her passionate love for her husband's

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favourite student. Geschlecht in Fesseln (Sex Frustration), with
Wilhelm Dieterle as director and star, was an intensely moving
film about the sexual problems of prison inmates. An attempt of a
different kind was the filming by Pabst of Wedekind's Biichse der
Pandora ({Pandora's Box*), at first banned by the Munich Presi-
dent of Police, but later on released. The film was not as forceful
as the more compact, intense stage-play, but had an exceptionally
strong effect thanks to the compelling performances by Louise
Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer and the excellent, very
much underrated Carl Gotz. A misfired attempt, on the other
hand, was Pabst's Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen ('Diary of a Lost
Girl'), based on the sentimental novel of the same title. This film
lagged behind his other films, though the dramaturgical treatment
was interesting and, in contrast to most German films, supplied a
clear exposition with all those essential details which are neces-
sary to give a lucid introduction to a problem. Masterly, however,
was Paul Czinner's Die Strasse der Verlorenen Seelen (Street of Lost
Souls) with Pola Negri (who had already played in a film in 1918,
opposite Harry Liedtke), Warwick Ward and Hans Rehmann. It
was an experiment to tell very simply and with a minimum of senti-
ment the story of a woman who changes completely in spirit and
appearance from a prostitute into the good wife of a lonely, quiet
lighthouse keeper and who, when her former souteneur breaks into
her domestic happiness and her husband loses faith in her without
justification, has a nervous breakdown and seeks, and finds, death.
Acting and production were equally effective in their realism.

The numerous sociological films towards the end of the silent
film era were completely surpassed by Gerhard Lamprecht's
Unter der Laterne (Underneath the Lamplight) (1928), based on an
actual event. Movingly, without reliance on cheap effects, Lam-
precht told the story of a young girl who, through her father's
narrowminded lack of understanding, sinks lower and lower in a
disastrous series of misunderstandings, finally committing suicide.
Nothing was exaggerated and the acting was simple and sincere.
And then followed the Zille film Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Gliick
(Mother Krausens Journey into Happiness), a film mainly con-
cerned with the fives of poor people living in the slum quarters in
Berlin's North, where Professor Zille became famous for his
stirring paintings. Unadorned, the film showed the squalid social

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conditions of that district, stirring the emotions by the fate of
people dragged into abject poverty through no fault of their own,
and a shortlived apparent happiness, which contrasted sharply
with their despair. Unfortunately the film — after having told of
the squalor of crowded, far too crowded, dwellings with their
poverty, their crimes, but also with fine people of great moral
strength — led to an unexpected happy end, which did not com-
pletely conform to their actual lives.

In the 'twenties there appeared in Germany, as elsewhere in
Europe, the real film-makers of the avant-garde. They were out-
siders, few of whom were gratefully recognized and used by the
major producing companies. Their uncompromising attitude was
inconvenient to the producers. It was a pity that no warm-hearted
and understanding backers could be found to enable the avant-
gardists, who had only small means at their disposal, to produce
independently on a large scale. Some of their work might have
been mere technical tricks, experiments in art for art's sake, or
might have been due to an exaggerated desire for originality. But
even such films deserved gratitude, for they demonstrated new
ways of seeing, new relations between man and the supernatural,
new forms of movement and, above all, the rhythmic significance
of these movements, which were recognized as an essential ele-
ment of all film-making.

Hans Richter made little 'essays' with his Rennsymphonie
(Racing Symphony), Optische Groteske (Optical Grotesque) and
Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts before Breakfast); in the latter six hats were
blown away and flew about in the air without letting themselves
be recaptured. More significant was his study Inflation, a cross-
sectional impression of the anti-social years 1920—23 in Germany.
In a chain of associations thirst for pleasure and desire for living
were contrasted with need and suicide, stock-exchange booms
with empty warehouses, and by superimposing faces and pictures
the dreadful contrasts of those days were retained. A realistic film
of a different nature was Wilfried Basse's Der Markt am Witten-
bergplatz (Market in Wittenburg Square), which gave an extract
from the opposed realities of life — an unrelated but interesting
study of social conditions. Walther Ruttmann made his Romanze
in der Nacht (Romance in the Night) in 1924, unfortunately only an
illustrated accompaniment of landscape and scenic motifs to a

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piano piece by Schumann. But his film Berlin was an imposing
composition, 'symphony of a big city' with a fascinating rhyth-
mic continuity, in synchronization with Meisel's music, and a
sensitively joined series of associations, abounding in superim-
position, montage and magnificent compositions of novel per-
spective. It was a film without plot, without actors, without sets,
but with the manifold face of a city of millions, with its palaces
next to gaping rows of sordid tenements, roaring railway trains,
the thundering of machines and the sea of lights at night, the
whirling traffic and idylls of nature, the rhythm of work, intoxi-
cating pleasure and nameless misery. Not quite of the same
compactness and unity was his film Melodie der Welt (Melody of
the World) (produced by the Hamburg- Amerika Linie). It showed
different parts of the world as seen through the eyes of a sailor.
There were sharp contrasts of image, then again a gay kaleido-
scope, and yet a dramatic picture emerged of the world in all its
varied aspects, with religious rites, the mobilization of armies
everywhere, with war and ruin. Later on, in 1935 (to mention
the film already at this stage) he made Stahl ('SteeV), taking the
song of work as his subject, but introducing a love interest this
time which impaired the film's general effect. In collaboration
with the Swiss and German Societies for the Fight Against
Venereal Diseases he produced an excellent example of the purely
propaganda and educational film, Feind im Blut (Enemy in the
Blood), made with artistry, yet never concealing its true purpose.
Also belonging to the category of avant-garde films was Siodmak's
Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), unassuming, yet inter-
esting because of its simplicity and original approach. It was an
amusing idea, for example, to let the camera suddenly come to a
standstill so that the grotesque impression was created of every-
thing having become frozen.

In the meantime, about 1926, Lotte Reiniger started on her
silhouette films, and told fairy stories with fairylike delicacy,
beauty and graceful charm: Das Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed
('The Adventures of Prince Achmed''), Das Abenteuer des Dr,
Doolittle ('The Adventures of Dr. Doolittle'), 1930, Harlequin, 1931,
Carmen, 1933. Unfortunately, there were at that time no chil-
dren's performances in Germany and exhibitors took little interest
in delicate things in those days.

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Fischipger's attempts at creating a unity of abstract forms, of
colour, movement and music, although tremendously successful
at sold-out special performances, met with a lack of understand-
ing on the part of cinema owners. To a special category belongs
Lazslo's experiment to bring to the screen automatically the
musical interpretation of abstract, colourful forms and move-
ments by using a so-called 'coloured lights' piano. About 1930 the
brothers Diehl began to make puppet films. The puppets were not
made to move by manipulating strings, but by photographing
them in various, continuously changed positions. These very life-
like films were extremely popular as supporting pictures.

The surrealistic experiment of G. W. Pabst in his film Geheim-
nisse einer Seele ("Secrets of the SouV) (1926), possessed something
of an avant-garde character. Pabst certainly succeeded in aston-
ishing and amazing with his completely new and very bold
technical and artistic means of creating illusions, with his gro-
tesque distortions and mirror tricks, with associations and symbols
difficult to interpret, but the result was more an atmosphere of
horrible madness rather than a psychological or psycho-analytical
study. This sensational and nerve -racking, intentionally subjec-
tive presentation of supernatural phenomena proved to be a fate-
ful prophesy of the pathological lust for crime which was to rage
between 1933 and 1945, and which had already begun to manifest
itself in those days with murder and terrorism.

All these experiments and studies made important suggestions
to the big producers and largely contributed to the fact that the
German silent film could not only sustain but also improve its
standard, even if this were limited only to its most outstanding
works.

F. W. Murnau's attempt to present Faust as a film in 1926 was
bound to fail. It left an impression of studio sets, of lifeless
stylization. The deep metaphysical content of this poetical work
which, after all, relied wholly on the word, was also lost in the
inadequate supply of titles. An outstanding event of the silent film
era was, on the other hand, Lamprecht's Schwester Veronika
(Sister Veronica), which told with tactful restraint the story of a
nurse who, in the ecstasy of her first great love, forgets her duty,
thereby becoming responsible for the death of a child. She is
acquitted, in an excellently produced trial scene, because the

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mother of the child has forgiven the nurse, who is herself about to
become a mother. On the same level was the tragedy Liebe (Love),
based on Balzac's story and directed by Czinner with Elisabeth
Bergner in the leading part. This great and charming actress
scored a personal triumph despite the fact that the film did not
quite succeed. Bergner's acting possessed that same grace and
delicate charm which had already given her such a unique posi-
tion on the German stage.

In Erinnerungen einer Nonne (Reminiscences of a Nun) the life
of a nun, who was also working as a nurse, was told in a com-
pletely new and simple manner. One night a patient is brought
into her ward. She recognizes him as the man who had once raped
her, afterwards leaving her to her fate. It was she who bore the
blame for all the dreadful suffering which she had to endure until
a nun took her into her charge. The doctor prescribes for the
seriously sick patient six drops of a certain medicine, a stronger
dose of which would be fatal. While the nurse is measuring the
medicine, two drops at a time, flashbacks tell the story of her
terrible past. After the last drop of the medicine she is tempted
to revenge herself until her eyes fall on to the crucifix above the
patient's bed, and she conquers the horrible thought. It was a film
of a 6tory within a story in which, however, the central character
appeared again and again. In the flashbacks during which the
main action was told, the bridal carriage in which the guilty man
and his bride were being driven to their wedding crossed the path
of the prison cart in which the future nurse was taken to prison.
The prison gates close behind her at the same moment as the
doors of the church open to receive the bridal pair.

There followed Lupu Pick's Wildente ('The Wild Duck') and
Karl Grune's Die Bruder Schellenberg (The Brothers Schellenberg),
the latter containing the now famous scene: a man is kneeling,
oblivious to everything, beside the body of a woman whom he has
killed. As he raises his head, his hair has turned grey.

Bela Balazs, spiritually belonging to the avant-garde, wrote in
1927, together with Herman Kosterlitz, an amusing satirical
comedy 1 -f- 1 = 3, which was made by Fritz Basch with a good
deal of humour. Likewise a satirical comedy, the Phobus film Die
Hose (A Pair of Trousers) chastised with slight, grotesque exaggera-
tion smalltown moral pharisaism. Stylized, with picturesque

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streets and houses, it brought a new note into the German film.
Unfortunately, only a few films of this type followed. The renters
preferred loud laughter to the appreciation of subtle humour
which was not sufficiently audible to correspond with their idea
of success with the public.

While Ludwig Berger's film Der Meister von Number g (The
Master of Nuremberg), with a scenario by himself, Robert Lieb-
mann and Rudolf Rittner, who also took the part of Hans Sachs,
was artistically unsuccessful because of its theatrical presentation,
Pabst succeeded in brilliantly producing Ilya Ehrenburg's Die
Liebe der Jeanne Ney ('The Loves of Jeanne iVey'), with the
author's collaboration. It was an exceptionally complicated plot
of espionage, counter-espionage, underground fighting between
White Russians and Bolsheviks, theft and murder. Pabst toned
down the brutality of the subject also through his handling of the
actors, including among others Brigitte Helm, Fritz Rasp, Hans
Jar ay, Vladimir Sokolo^.

An attempt to reconstruct, with unwarranted sentimentality,
the murder of Rathenau (under different names, of course) in the
film Feme (Lynch Law) was regret able. With it the authors Juttke
and Klaren and the director Richard Oswald served the German
people more than badly in so far as they sought to enlist under-
standing for the murderer just as if he had been led astray, and by
presenting the great stage and screen actress Adele Sandrock as
the forgiving mother. More courageous and less reprehensible in
its spirit was Am Rande de Welt ('At the Edge of the WorW),
(directed by Karl Grune with the excellent co-operation of F. A.
Wagner), which also appeared in 1927, a passionate avowal
against war. Well cast with Brigitte Helm, Albert Steinruck and
Wilhelm Dieterle, the film opened symbolically with a mill grind-
ing corn for bread, and ended on the hopeful note, that a young
man, having survived the war, will build new mills for more
bread. These two interesting opening and closing sequences made
up for far too much concession to love at first sight.

In 1928-29 German silent film production was at its best. Fritz
Lang made his great film Spionage ('The Spy') (1928), based, as
most of his films of that period, on a book by Thea von Harbou.
For its subject the film went back to the chaos of the post-war
period, and described with new and often gripping technique the

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atmosphere of murder, robbery, and blackmail. In 1929 followed
Lang's Die Frau im Mond ('The Woman in the Moon*), an attempt
to demonstrate, boldly and imaginatively, with the technical
means only available to UFA, the fantasy of a journey to the
moon. In VarietS (' Variety') Jannings, bull-necked, with his prison
number branded on his back, gave an unforgettable performance.
The film Luther (1928), with Eugen Klopfer in the title role, was a
dangerous experiment by Wilhelm Dieterle, at which he had
failed once before. The attempt was bound to fail because of the
impossibility of bringing to life, however brilliantly, such a tre-
mendous spiritual movement, particularly as the film was silent.

Attempts at producing films in co-operation with other coun-
tries had varying results. In 1928 French and German actors
played together in Du sollst nicht Ehebrechen, based on the novel
Therese Raquin, under the direction of the great Frenchman
Jacques Feyder. The experiment was successful thanks to a good
scenario by F. Carlsen and Willy Haas and the great art of
Feyder, who guided the actors with a subtlety that enabled him
to maintain a harmonious continuity in the production of this
unrelieved tragedy. The attempt at German— Spanish co-produc-
tion, with two directors, the Austrian Ucicky and the Spanish
Perojo, and an equally mixed cast, ended rather less well. Em-
barrassing misunderstandings, deliberate changes of the scenario,
differences in temperament all prevented a unified result, despite
a few good scenes, particularly those with a small Spanish boy.
On the other hand, German— Russian co-operation on Tolstoy's
Der Lebende Leichnam ('The Living Corpse') was a real success.
Fedor Ozep was the director and scenarist, and German and
Russian designers and actors of both countries took part. In spite
of that the whole film succeeded and not just a few scenes.
Direction and acting were in parts equal to the best Russian films.
At any rate, it was demonstrated that such international co-opera-
tion on films was not only possible but also profitable.

Documentary film production started very early in Germany
and was, particularly with regard to educational and cultural
films, very intensive. Some of the first, probably, were the Beifuss
educational films. The most important and perhaps even unique
studio for the production of these films was the UFA Cultural
Section, of which Dr. Nicholas Kaufmann was in charge, assisted

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by a staff of first-rate film experts and scientific advisers. It was
here that, with the help of the most up-to-date technical equip-
ment, especially for cinemicrography, great and small miracles
of production were achieved, first in black and white, then in
colour and finally with the use of sound. They dealt with such
varied aspects of fife as the growth and decay of a flower or the
secrets of the universe. The films produced were of a strictly
scientific as well as popular educational and cultural character.

The making of films abroad was particularly characteristic of
the silent film period in Germany. It led to all parts of the world.
In Canada, the engineer Dreyer made an excellent educational film.
Die Leuchte Asiens ('Light of Asia?), dealing with the life of
Buddha, was made in India with Indian actors, in particular
Himansu Raj . It was a film of tremendous Indian festivals and
then again of gentle, lyrical situations or horrifying dying skele-
tons. A Colin Ross film led to Cairo, others into the interior of
Africa and into Persia, the land of Der Silberne Lowe (The Silver
Lion). Not only these but also the German countryside and towns
were 'discovered', as, for instance, a film about the River Isar
showed. Made as an educational film, it told with continuity and
good effect of the cultural and economic development along this
Munich river with all its changing, shifting scenery.

Dr. Albert Fanck discovered the secret beauty of the mountains
for the film. He began with his attempt Wunder des Schneeschuhs
(Miracle of the Ski) in 1921. His most important productions,
however, were Der Kampf urns Matterhorn (Struggle for Matter*
horn) — he was still working with Luis Trenker then — with its
amazing feats of mountaineering, and also his Die Weisse Holle
von Pitz Palii ('The White Hell of Pitz PaW) directed together
with G. W. Pabst. Leni Riefenstahl and the airman Udet entered
the field. The grandiose scenes in these films were — as in nearly
all Fanck's films — photographed by cameramen Allgeier, Angst,
Schneeberger and Metzner, working under greatest difficulties
and peril. Then followed Fanck's sound film Der Weisse Rausch
(White Frenzy), with fifty internationally famous skiing experts
taking part. Up to that time this was the most amusing of these
mountaineering films. It was a grotesque comedy in which Leni
Riefenstahl, acting the part of a comic skiing pupil, and the
holder of the speed title Lantschner, together with the skiing

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acrobat Riml appeared. Further there was Stiirme uber dem
Montblanc ('Storms over Montblanc') (1930), of which a critic
wrote that clouds, snowdrifts, avalanches and storms had been its
chief actors. These cameramen performed miracles in shooting
the breathtaking sequences of Sepp Rist's fantastic mountain-
eering feats. UFA's Kohner film SOS-Eisberg ('S.O.S. Iceberg'),
made by Fanck, as well as his film about the Olympic Games Das
Weisse Stadion (The White Stadium), made with the assistance of
the International and Swiss Committees, were notable examples
of cultural and educational films.

In the meantime Luis Trenker had begun to direct his own
films, which laid greater stress on dramatic action. Der Sohn der
Berge (Son of the Mountains), produced by the Italian Bonnard
company, showed the adventurous ascent of a mountain guide
with an alleged insurance swindler, a rescue action at night of
extraordinary romantic beauty, and a skiing and jumping com-
petition by Swiss and Norwegian experts. Even more exciting was
his later film Berge in Flammen (Mountains in Flames), a French
Vendal-Delac production, co-directed by Trenker and Hartl. It
showed the murderous mountain fights of the first world war
among the gaping clefts of the Dolomites, and told of the friend-
ship of two men who come face to face as enemy soldiers, but
resume their friendship at the end of the war. The language of
this film was the language of a majestic landscape defiled and
bitterly destroyed — it was a cry against war. Der Rebell,
directed by Kurt Bernhardt and Luis Trenker, possessed all that
had still been lacking in the other film: the atmosphere of the
Tyrolean homeland and a deeper psychological understanding. It
had as its subject the bloody civil war of 1807, and the fight of the
Tyroleans against the Franco-Bavarian oppressive occupation.

The experiments and achievements in the sphere of the purely
advertising and propaganda film were of no little importance to
the German film. Here, too, a Berlin production company created
a tradition which, after early attempts of mixing natural photo-
graphy with animated drawings, finally turned completely to-
wards the latter in Julius Pinschewer's films.

These films pioneered the way in this specialized field, similar to
the factual, simple and direct posters by, among others, Lucien
Bernhard. Pinschewer began in 1910 and produced his first

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commercial animated cartoon for Kathreiner's coffee in 1911. A
coffee-pot was pictured, running after a cup and filling it with the
steaming drink. Equally direct and striking was an advertising
cartoon about press buttons, made in 1912. While in a long series
of such films only objects were represented, the first German
animated film, Der Schreiber und die Biene (The Writer and the
Bee), made for Beyer's ink, appeared in 1918. An artistic experi-
ment was the first abstract advertising film, drawn in colour, that
appeared in 1923 in the production of which Walther Ruttmann
took part. This film, advertising Excelsior tyres, showed a motor
car tyre attacked by small sharp objects and elastically jumping
down some steps, all possessing the same rhythmic continuity
which, much later, was to become so important in Disney's films.
In those days the colouring could not yet be copied directly and
had to be transferred with the aid of carbons. 1928 saw another
important experiment: the animated sound film which, advertis-
ing Tri-Ergon gramophone records, was the very first of its kind.
The film was reduced to sub-standard and then run continuously
on a projector, so that the contents and length of the spoken text
could be calculated as accurately as possible, and the spacing of
the music could be worked out by its composer, Meyer-Marco.
Since then several other similar companies have come into being,
such as Eku in Munich and Doring in Berlin, but Pinschewer him-
self also improved his process. Harry Jager and Fischer- Kosen,
who had frequently worked together with Pinschewer, were very
successful on their own. Later the serious-minded work of Noldan
attracted a good deal of attention, and finally there was Berthold
Bartosch, whose famous film Uldee (based on woodcuts by Frans
Masereel) has been described as the first 'trick' film with a serious
theme.

The last great silent films, apart from a few late-comers, were
produced in 1929. As in all film producing countries, new at-
tempts, new experiments were started — it was a new beginning.
Nearly all authors and directors, as well as many actors, remained,
but new ones were added. Unmindful of all the warnings against
the so-called 100 per cent 'speech and noise' film, most
directors were now trying to defend the new achievement, 'sound',
very much like children defending their toys. They simply
revelled in speech, music and noises, often employing these in the

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wrong places and exceeding completely their artistic limits, and
neglecting the movement of their films. But this lack of artistic
discipline did not last long, very much less, in fact, than it appeared
to those taking part and the critics at the time. Those artists
who had received their training in the more important films soon
found their way back to the moving picture.

The musical, of course, was particularly suitable for this com-
bination of sound and movement. Big or small, everybody
went for it. Wilhelm Thiele, who developed into a specialist of
the operetta type of musical, made the first German one, Liebes-
walzer (Love Waltz) for UFA, which was produced by Erich
Pommer and for which Hans Muller and Robert Liebmann wrote
the scenario. It was a light parody, liberally supplied with sly
digs, lively, amusing and full of new ideas. Lilian Harvey and
Willy Fritsch, teamed in many other films, Karl Ludwig Diehl,
Georg Alexander and Victor Schwannecke formed an ideal cast —
it was a very promising beginning.

Among the great mass of musical films with their silly song hits,
there were a few films that stood out: Pressburger's UFA film Die
Singende Stadt (A City of Song) (directed by Carmine Gallone)
was exceptional not only because of the good acting in it and
Kiepura's beautiful voice, but also because of its simple, natural
and psychologically convincing plot. Friedrich Zelnik's Viennese
film Walzerparadies with Charlotte Susa, Paul Horbiger, Szoke
Szakall and the old, wonderful Adele Sandrock, was a beautiful,
amusing and unsentimental trip to the Danube city. On a high
level were also 2 Herzen im Dreiviertel Takt (Two Hearts in Three-
quarter Time) (directed by Bolvary with music by Meisel), Melodie
der Liebe and Melodie des Herzens (Melody of the Heart). To be
taken more seriously as a film, in spite of the storms of laughter
caused by its natural humour, was Wer Nimmt die Liebe Ernst?
(Who Would Take Love Seriously?). Based on an excellent scenario
by Hermann Kosterlitz and Curt Alexander, Erich Engel's direc-
tion was good cinema throughout, without any scenes wasted and
without using emphasis as an end in itself. A particular asset was
its rhythmic construction, so seldom understood and carried out
by directors, and yet of such decisive importance to every film.

Progress continued rapidly. Der Blaue Engel ('The Blue Angel')
followed in 1930, written by Karl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmoller

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and Robert Liebmann, based on Professor Unrat, the novel by
Heinrich Mann. The authors and the director, von Sternberg,
created a splendid, grotesque satire, a little exaggerated, but yet
pitiless and inescapable in its psychology. Jannings's performance
as the professor was exceptionally moving.

There was a rather daring attempt to make the film Dreyfus in
the Germany of 1930. This courage and the devotion with which
Richard Oswald directed the film could not disguise the fact that
a good opportunity had been missed to give a true picture of that
time. It was a faithful reconstruction, almost documentary in
character, of the actual events, which were brought to life by such
outstanding actors as Fritz Kortner, Albert Bassermann, Erwin
Kaiser, Oskar Homolka and, in particular, by the truly moving
performance by Grete Mosheim. That the performances were
enthusiastically applauded often in the middle of the film, meant
a great deal for the year 1930.

One of the best things was that it was still possible in the years
1930—31, despite the great victories of the Hitlerites in Parliament
and at the polls, for the German cinema to produce a number of
serious, even passionate, anti-war films. There was Westfront
1918, based on the novel Vier von der Infantrie ("Four from the
Infantry'), a Nero film in which G. W. Pabst, its director, demon-
strated the horrors of war and the accompanying demoralization
at home with unmitigated realism. A soldier on leave finds his
wife in bed with another man. Tired, he resigns himself, and all
his wife's pleading for forgiveness, for one single kiss, cannot
rouse him at all. No less realistic and pitiless was Somme, das Grab
der Millionen (Somme, Grave of Millions), directed by Heinz Paul.
This hell on earth was recreated in the film — tree stumps lament-
ing to heaven, young men in the flower of youth marching into
murderous battle with bayonets drawn and faces set. To thou-
sands this was a faithful portrayal of heroes in trenches.

While the showing in U.S.A. of Westfront 1918 was doubtless a
great success, the Remarque film All Quiet on the Western Front,
which showed with the same dynamic force war as it really is, was
banned in 1930. The ban was finally lifted under the condition
that only an 'improved' version of the film would be shown
abroad. Candor Film Co. produced Die Andere Seite (''Journey's
End'), based on R. C. Sheriff's play, which was also directed

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by Heinz Paul with Conrad Veidt playing Captain Stanhope. The
film lived up to the original. At last came Niemandsland (' War is
HelV), a Resco film directed by Victor Trivas and based on an
idea created by himself and Leonhard Frank. An experiment was
made to show the senselessness of war through soldiers of the
different nations. They all find that the war against one another
is madness and stop fighting. It was a strange, altogether unusual
scene, as these men, speaking different languages — Englishmen,
Frenchmen, Germans, a South African and an Austrian, tried to
approach each other in the trenches, hardly daring to speak, yet
gradually beginning to talk and finally to help each other as
comrades and as human beings.

To this class of films without stars and without hero worship,
and with its beliefs in international co-operation without war,
belonged Kameradschaft, probably the most important artis-
tic experiment in German film history, in subject as well as
technique. It was written by Karl Otten, Vajda and Lampel and
directed by Pabst. It was a film dedicated to the memory of the
disaster at Courrieres, when German together with French miners
tried to rescue their French comrades at a depth of 800 metres. In
the film, too, it was rescue work across the frontiers, among
collapsing galleries, breaking girders, a fight against bursting
floods and escaping gases. With magnificent technical mastery
Pabst allowed things to speak for themselves as they were, no
movement, no sound, no noise was superfluous as the desperate
women tried to storm the mine, or during the men's fight against
the elements deep underground. Because of this the film's success
was so great, so complete. But then there was also an ironical
conclusion: while French and German miners are celebrating their
reconciliation, the railings which formed the frontier in the mine
below are being re-erected without further ado by the police
officials.

The sound film dealt with social and other important problems
even more seriously and to a greater extent than the silent film.

In Zwei Welten (Two Worlds) E. A. Dupont confronted military
and aristocratic circles and their prejudices against Jewish fife, and
attempted to show the overcoming of their differences. The film
did not, on the whole, have sufficient action and was too slow.
Dupont became freer and showed greater fluency in his other film

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Menschen im Kafig (People in a Cage), which he also made for
British International Pictures. The film, with Conrad Veidt,
Kortner, George and Tala Birell, dealt with the tragedy of three
men in a lighthouse fighting about one woman, and the hopeless
struggle was interrupted again and again by scenes of nature,
stressing the mood or in contrast with it.

A number of excellent films dealt with school and educational
problems. Revoke im Erziehungshaus (Revolt in a School for Young
Delinquents) (directed by Georg Asagarov) with, among others,
Renate Muller, Toni van Eyck, Oskar Homolka, was an im-
pressive indictment of the narrowmindedness and heartlessness
found in the treatment of young people who have been led astray
and are difficult to manage. The beginning takes us right into the
heart of the problem: dogs begin to bark and angrily tear at their
chains as they hear a shadowy figure creeping round the wall of
the institution. Boykott (or Primanerehre), an Emelka-Ilma film
with Lil Dagover and the gentle and sensitive Karin Evans,
condemns the cruel way in which a high-school pupil is ostracized
by his fellow students because of his father's embezzlements.
In vain the teacher struggles to rouse the better nature of
his pupils, until the most vociferous of the persecutors suffers
a similar fate and commits suicide. It was an indictment of
the typically German practice of intolerance and of the sense-
less conception of honour in the so-called upper circles. The
direction by Robert Land was, with the help of Franz Koch's
splendid camera-work, psychologically correct in mood and
atmosphere, and the acting, too, was excellent. 1933 brought the
interesting film Reifende Jugend (Adolescence) (director Carl Froh-
lich), dealing with the problem of jealousy between pupils and
teacher because of a very popular girl student. Here, too we find
the sincere and natural acting of young people, seemingly por-
traying their own lives. Skandal um Eva (Scandal about Eva),
based on the comedy Skandal um Oily, was a humorous yet
serious-minded satire, partly set against a school background.
Henny Porten, one of the earliest (if not also the longest serving)
of film actresses, played the popular school-mistress who comes
under the 'dreadful' suspicion of having an illegitimate child
which, in reality, turns out to be that of her fiance, the Minister of
Education. On the one hand, there is the moral indignation of the

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whole town, led by the Minister himself, on the other the entire
school's enthusiasm for 'Mademoiselle Mama'. G. W. Pabst, as the
director, brought out the points with charming humour, and
Henny Porten as the adored teacher was more lovable than ever.

The Erich Pommer film Voruntersuchung (Preliminary Investi-
gation), directed by Robert Siodmak, now with UFA, and star-
ring, among others, Albert Basserman and Heinrich Gretler, the
Swiss artist, was an indictment of the cruel methods of criminal
investigation. Bassermann, as the examining magistrate,
torments his son's friend, who is suspected of the murder of a
prostitute, during the examination. Later suspicion falls on
the magistrate's own son because of certain circumstantial
evidence, until the real murderer is caught at last. Siodmak
lavished ideas and symbols on this film — which was all very
good — yet a drag on the development of the thrilling story.
I can still recall the unnerving sound as the examining magistrate,
pacing up and down, draws his keys across the radiators of the
central heating.

Several good sound films once again dealt with the problem of
prison inmates. Moral um Mitternacht (Morality at Midnight) told
of a prisoner, stirred to his depths by a singer, who took part in a
concert for the prisoners. With the warder's permission he leaves
the prison for a night and returns punctually, elated by a great
expedience. Hinter Gittern (Behind Bars), brilliantly directed by
Fejos with Heinrich George in the leading part, was a reconstruc-
tion of a report about an American penitentiary, where the
prisoners had been driven to mutiny by their terrible sexual
sufferings. The scene before the mutiny was one of feverish
tension. The prisoners secretly pass weapons from hand to hand
while the chaplain, in his sermon, preaches 'Thou shalt not kill'.
Very few of the numerous other films dealing with sexual prob-
lems succeeded in presenting this difficult subject quite as tact-
fully, yet with such penetrating analysis as Gefahren der Liebe
(Dangers of Love). It was directed by Eugen Thiele, with Toni van
Eyck and Bassermann giving restrained performances.

A most unusual but nevertheless important problem was the
subject of Kinder vor Gericht (Children in Court). It gave an
example of how serious the consequences can be when quite
innocent people become incriminated by the morbid, fantastic

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lies sometimes told by children, who maintain them convincingly
even in court. George Klaren wrote and directed this film.

In 1931, the most successful year of the German sound film,
appeared Madchen in Uniform, based on a book by Christa
Winsloe, who also adapted it for the film, and directed by Leon-
tine Sagan. The film was a serious indictment of those exclusive
boarding schools to which aristocratic families sent their daugh-
ters to receive a strict, militaristic education. The film begins with
drill. Hardheartedness and lack of understanding greet the new
boarder, who is misunderstood when she, like all the other girls,
develops a passion for the favourite mistress. It is impossible to
forget the agonized cry for her when she cannot be found, at first
isolated shouts then merging into one single, shrill cry which
echoes through the landings and the rooms, rousing the mistresses.
These landings with girls in mortal fear — this magnificent photo-
graphy and use of sound! It is also impossible to forget Dorothea
Wieck as the adored teacher, correct and cold as prescribed, but
of compelling charm, and also Hertha Thiele, here playing her
very first part as the new pupil — extremely moving in her
emotional confusion and despair. And this singularly beautiful
and important film was made not by a company, but on a co-
operative share basis, and therefore without salaries.

In 1931 also appeared the Lamprecht film Emit und die
Detektive, based on the book by Kastner, the romantic and
amusing story of boys who play the same sort of pranks as every-
body must have played them, and who together catch the thief
who has robbed one of them: an original story with light and
charming treatment.

The same year brought M, a co-operative effort by the author
Thea von Harbou, the director Fritz Lang, the cameraman Fritz
Arno Wagner and others, starring Peter Lorre, Gustav Griind-
gens, Paul Kemp and Theo Lingen. It was a dangerous film of
uncanny pictorial power, gripping in spite of its many weaknesses
because of its wealth of fascinating detail. The film was full of
magnificent ideas magnificently carried out, full of rhythm, full of
dramatic force, and also owed its effectiveness to the oppressive
atmosphere and the very original manner of presentation. A work
of art — and yet the handling of dialogue and sound was not
without faults; there was far too much originality. It was a cine-

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matic error, for example, to let the voice of the police president,
speaking at headquarters, echo through the whole town — and
that without the use of wireless or loudspeaker . . . And it was
astonishing to see a kind of legalization, even glorification of the
underworld organization. 'A town is looking for a murderer. Two
completely different groups of people, the criminal police and the
underworld organization, search for him and find his trail', so ran
the official synopsis.

Once again there appeared two avant-garde films, which pro-
vided something different from the usual screen fare. Sonntag des
Lebens (Life's Sunday), a psychological study written by Bela
Balazs and directed by Leo Mittler, did unfortunately not quite
come off". So Sind die Menschen (Such is Life) was a simply told,
forceful impression of life in a boarding house, with a brief love
story — in real life probably a matter of only two hours — fascina-
ting just because it was so ordinary. It was the first film with
Brigitte Horney, one of the most sincere actresses of the German
screen. There was a classic scene of contrasts in this film: a man is
sitting alone in his room in silent dejection, despairing because of
a bitter disappointment; in the corridor outside, where several
people are standing chatting and laughing, life goes on regardless
of the man's despair.

Although already tried once before in 1921, Die Dreigroschen
Oper, directed by G. W. Pabst for Tobis and Warner Bros., was
original too. It was a lavish production containing many 'im-
provements', which had nothing much to do with the original,
but were probably meant to be concessions to the notorious taste
of the public. This resulted in a confusion of styles, despite many
fine details. There were many protests and a lawsuit by Brecht
and Weil.

UFA reached the zenith of their super film production with the
Pommer film Der Kongress Tanzt ('Congress Dances'1), written by
Norbert Falk and Robert Liebmann, and directed by Erik
Charell, whose first film this was. Once again we find that typical
mixing of styles in a production which was both grand and lavish.
Despite the line-up of actors such as Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover,
Adele Sandrock, Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch and Paul Hftrbiger,
the inadequacy of the production became apparent in some of the
scenes. The film was carefree, lively and had rhythm, quite apart

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from its dancing scenes. The sequence in which the song of the
Czar's mistress, who is driving in her carriage through the town
into the country, is taken up by everyone, was lovely as far as it
went, although it was really just a good imitation of a similar
scene in Lubitsch's Monte Carlo.

Asta Nielsen played once again with Ery Boys and Ellen
Schwanneke in the very beautiful Unmogliche Liebe (Impossible
Love), which dealt with the problem of the 'woman of forty' who
finds her last great love and because of it comes into conflict with
her grown-up daughters. Waschnek's direction was tactful and
imaginative in the treatment of the various situations, which were
at first light-hearted and free from affectation, later becoming
more and more depressing. Asta Nielsen was still the same great
actress, but in the film her voice was disturbing rather than
attractive, as it sounded on the stage.

Paul Czinner must have made the tragedy Der Traumende
Mund ('Dreaming Lips'), based on a play by Henri Bernstein,
with Elisabeth Bergner and Rudolf Forster, with an excess of
enthusiasm. This might explain why he was not too particular
over its psychological consistency and why the tragic death of the
heroine was not altogether convincing. All the more important,
however, was the direction as such, the restrained mood, the un-
surpassed, sensitive acting, especially that of Elisabeth Bergner.
Particularly brilliant visually was the scene in which she, carried
away by the personality and the playing of the violinist (Forster),
sees nothing but him and then everything else only as if in a
trance; a great achievement also on the part of the cameraman,
Krieger.

During the years 1933 to 1935, before the German film industry
lost its freedom and importance completely, it seemed as if Ger-
man production was anxious to prove, with several very valuable
pictures, the high standard which it was able to achieve.

There followed in 1933 Sonnenstrahl (Ray of Sunshine), a
story of delicate, almost fairy-like quality, telling of a young
man who, when on the verge of drowning himself in despair,
hears the cries for help of a young girl and saves her. This
is how the film begins, in this heavy, oppressive mood by the
river. Then: how incomparable the scene of a wedding, wit-
nessed by the lovers sitting in the corner of the church, they,

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too, answering the parson's well-known question with a soft
'yes'; or the whirl of a fun-fair, where she, as a balloon seller,
comes to his aid during an accident and lets all her balloons
go. One could talk indefinitely about this film and the very
naturalistic acting by Annabella, Gustav Frohlich, Paul Otto and
others. It was a late but genuine avant-garde film. Then Lam-
precht's happy, rhythmical and vivacious fairytale Turandot
(1934), into which he escaped from the increasing severity of the
censorship. It was produced as an UFA film by Stapenhorst, a very
grand and pretentious production, but Lamprecht handled it and
the acting of, among others, Willy Fritsch, Kathe von Nagy and
Paul Kemp with the same sure feeling for style. (His polished
style and wealth of good ideas in Einmal eine Grosse Dame Sein
(To be a Great Lady Once) were, perhaps intentionally, expended
on an insignificant subject.) Max Ophuls' screen version of
Schnitzler's tragedy of the old Vienna, with its officers and young
girls in love, Liebelei, was a great experience because of its
appreciative presentation and the subtle artistry of its moods and
situations. Particularly moving was the scene at night after the
girl has thrown herself out of a fourth-floor window. Magda
Schneider, Olga Tschechowa, Paul Horbiger and Gustav Grund-
gens — to mention only a few — were an ideal cast. Ophuls' experi-
ment in making an operatic film, The Bartered Bride (Smetana)
with Jarmila Nowotna and Domgraf-Fassbander, was less success-
ful. Sometimes the music killed the picture, sometimes the picture
the music, sometimes they killed each other. But this lavishly pro-
duced and otherwise brilliantly directed film proved that there
cannot be a happy marriage between opera and film.

At about this time another unusual picture appeared: Das
Blaue Licht ('The Blue Light*), ostensibly a symbol of the peasants'
instinctive urge towards the light, and based on an old legend
from the Dolomites. The film tells the story of a young girl, who
is believed to be a witch by the superstitious peasants, and with
whom a stranger has fallen in love. The girl is persecuted by the
villagers, and the stranger, in an effort to help her, sets out to
bring the shining mountain crystals, from which the legend
originated, into the village. However, he returns too late as the
girl has already killed herself. It was a film of extraordinary
beauty, pictorial power and of a rare rhythmic continuity, a co-

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operative effort by Leni Riefenstahl, Bela Balazs and the camera-
man Hans Schneeberger. Anna und Elisabeth (director Curiel),
too, was something new, an experiment unfortunately unsuccess-
ful in dealing with the problem of healing by prayer — probably
suggested by the events connected with Therese von Konners-
reuth — but without the courage to answer the question.

Der Tunnel, based on the novel by Kellermann, was a techni-
cally perfect production. Kurt Bernhardt's success was well
deserved. But the sentiments, which played an essential part in
the novel, were insufficiently considered, and on account of too
much attention being paid to criminal, international speculation
and all-conquering technical achievement, a synthesis of ideas
was not reached — a fault with many experts of film technique . . .
Another politically harmless film was Der Schwarze Walfish (The
Black Whale), based on a play by Marcel Pagnol, and with Emil
Jannings, whose great art was here, probably for the last time,
employed on a subject of this kind. Excellently directed, Jannings
here played an honest, good-hearted innkeeper who, with con-
vincing kindness, takes into his care the girl who is expecting a
child by his son and has been left by him. While the presentation
of milieu was excellent and the first part of the film was good,
Wendhausen was on the whole less successful with his Peer Gynt.
This first part, however, with its unique and exciting scenes of
Norwegian landscape and the scenes between Peer and his dying
mother, were some of the best and most beautiful in German
cinema. Apart from this, a good opportunity was missed to expose
the lust for power already then in evidence, a fact which might
have been due to a not quite faithful interpretation of the subject,
or the fault of the scenario. Albers, although he was really too old
to play the young Peer, had a great and well- deserved success.

The great tradition of German film art, with its honest endeav-
our to create a tradition and an outlook in films irreproachable
from every point of view came to an end. The last that tried to
follow this tradition were: the wonderful Schiinzel film Amphy-
trion, with the highly gifted, sensitive Kathe Gold and the
irreplaceable Adele Sandrock; Hohe Schule, with its now classic
direction by Erich Engel and its interesting experiments with
optical illusions; further the Willy Forst film Mazurka (1935),
which was good, but not altogether logical in its psychological

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treatment; and two very good versions of Variete, one German, one
French, directed by Nicholas Farkas, starring Annabella and
Hans Albers. In these first years of Nazi tyranny censorship was
being increasingly applied, and if a few more reasonably good
films did appear, they were more like the last exertions of a dying
creature. Der Rote Renter (The Red Reuter) (1934) might be men-
tioned here only because it represented the first attempt at a
full-length colour film.

But from now on it was politics and propaganda. The opening
note had already been struck in 1933 with the UFA film Fliicht-
linge (Refugees) with Hans Albers, directed by Ucicky and pro-
duced by Gunther Stapenhorst. The film itself was nothing much,
but it was characteristic of the tendencies which it introduced
into German film production. In the official synopsis it said:
'. . . . turned bitter and disgusted by the servile spirit of the
German republic, he, the hero, goes abroad after having suffered
imprisonment in his fatherland because of his patriotism . . . '

The great tradition of German-speaking film art, which had
been created and developed by the constant exchange of artists
and technicians between Germany and Austria, and also Switzer-
land, was now carried on by Austria alone, unfortunately for a
short period only.

The most important films of this period from 1934 onwards
were Maskerade, Episode and Burgtheater. Maslserade was a Willy
Forst film produced by Tobis Sascha in Vienna. In it Paula
Wessely created her first great part, and the cast further included
Adolf Wohlbriick, Hilde von Stolz, Olga Tschechowa, Julie Serda,
Walter Janssen, Hans Moser and Peter Petersen. Peter Petersen
— here playing in a film for the first time as far as I know — created
a character of rare directness and simplicity. It was said that the
plot of the film was based on a society scandal of 1902 which, in
the film, began with a carnival ball. Willy Forst not only re-
created the ball with intoxicating rhythm, but also showed great
talent in his mingling of the dramatic and the humorous.

Not quite of the same standard, but yet above average, was
the Reich film Episode. There were some wonderful shots and
scenes, but also some dull parts, and the unity of style found in
Maskerade was not quite attained. Burgtheater (1937) put a
dignified final touch to a great film era. It is impossible to forget

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EXPANSION OF GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN FILM

the scene on the square in front of the theatre, where a young girl
is waiting for the famous actor she adores, believing him to be in
love with her. She has to watch as he leaves the theatre and, with-
out taking any notice of her, drives off with a fashionable lady.
There she stands alone in the dark, still standing, even when the
last glimmer of light can no longer be seen in the theatre, lonely,
a poor, tiny creature almost swallowed up by the huge, dark
square.

The survey attempted here of the experiments made by the
German and Austrian film, of its efforts and struggles for a
definite outlook and a high artistic level, its fight for the very
body and soul of the film, must not disguise the fact that, apart
from a few exceptional years, the overwhelming majority of films
were not inspired by such motives, and in fact were not, did not
want to be and could not be anything but commodities designed
for the taste of the customer. As a rule, relatively few of the 100
to 125 films made each year were good or very good. The market
was dominated by uninspired routine pictures, by stupid Rhine-
Heidelberg and Vienna-films, by misrepresentations of life, by
tasteless, sentimental operetta, by dubious problem and adven-
ture stories, which gambled on the baser instincts of the public,
by occasional historical glorifications, which were by no means
harmless, and by noisy military farces. The higher mathematics
of certain reactionary production executives, who deliberately
debased the intellectual standard of the public, fooled people into
believing that their films were profitable, whereas in reality they
led to financial and political bankruptcy.

While in France and Russia outstanding film technicians occu-
pied themselves with the theory of film art, such work was also
in the case of Germany, frequently, perhaps mainly at first,
carried out by persons not professionally engaged in production
and by avant-gardists. Both categories met with distrust and lack
of interest on the part of the majority of people actively engaged
in the film industry. Studying or reading up theory was incon-
venient and, above all, did not bring in any immediate cash . . .
Some of those theoreticians and avant-gardists gave up when they
found they were no match for the unrelenting opposition on the
part of major film production. Others let themselves be influenced

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EXPANSION OF GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN FILM

by material considerations and reactionary views. In this way a
large part of the artistic potential was not utilized.

The courage and devotion of those authors, artists and tech-
nicians who have asserted themselves despite all obstacles has to
be rated all the higher. Only because of that was it possible that
there were years such as 1927—28 and 1931, during which significant
or irreproachable films formed a high percentage of the total
production.

As artists they could not reconcile their conception of true
creative achievement with the degrading part played by the
scenarist in film production, and the frequent changing of scen-
arios beyond all recognition. That writers are less capable than
other mortals of acquiring the technique of scripting for the film
is, of course, a stupid assumption.

One must also mention the serious interest displayed in film
matters in Germany and Austria by journalists, who were cease-
lessly striving for independent and irreproachable film criticism.
Without doubt, they exerted a positive influence on production.

On striking a balance between the good and outstanding in
German film production, and these only, one finds that, from its
early beginnings, it showed an unmistakable bias towards serious,
often decidedly problematical, subjects and a slow, heavy, but
by no means unwieldy treatment. Otherwise there was a desire to
avoid such subjects and hide the resulting lack of contents behind
brilliant facades constructed in the best cinematic manner. The
golden mean by which serious, even daring subjects are handled
with a light touch, and frivolous subjects not without a certain
seriousness, was not achieved by German films, although this was
the case with nearly all of the more important Austrian films,
even if not quite in the style of the outstanding French produc-
tions of the pre-war period.

The new German film will have to begin again with new
experiments. As in other intellectual fields, it is impossible simply
to take up the threads of past achievements. Most of its exponents
do not live in Germany any longer, or are dead. Many of those
that have remained have lost this outlook, and even those
who bore themselves with the greatest firmness and valour
were cut off from all life of freedom and humanity, that is,
all real life. They have thus lost contact with the outside world

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and true standards for artistic values, which are indispensable
to the film artist. Only rarely have people of great wisdom
and genius found these standards always and under all cir-
cumstances in themselves. Perhaps the film in Austria, where
conditions are likely to be more favourable than in Germany
in the coming years, will make speedier progress. Let us hope that
in both countries men will join together, who, with courage and
strength for a new spiritual beginning, will find also a new road
for the film.

(Translated by Bernard and Moura Wolpert)

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BY HANS RICHTER

this account of the origin and history of the German avant-
garde film is not written by a scholar of history. I wish to tell what
I know about it, but as I am involved in it myself, it necessarily
represents, besides dates and facts, also my personal viewpoint
and experience.

I also have to assert that my memory for dates is not always
absolutely reliable. Only the obvious confusion and misquotation
of dates and facts in most of the printed matter about the avant-
garde encourages me to be rather certain about the time and
fact-table I am offering.

My approach may be unorthodox, but it will nevertheless
describe my experience and might stimulate others who want to
follow ideas of their own.

The avant-garde film (the film as an art experiment) originated
in Germany after the first World War in 1921. It became, never-
theless, not a real 'movement' in Germany itself, as it did in
France. There might be several reasons. One of them certainly is
that its roots were in the international art movement called
modern art, which had its centre in Paris rather than in Berlin.
Another reason might be that even before 1914 Delluc and
Canudo in France had visualized the film as a plastic art form
('valeur plastique'), that is, the film without story, and had
formulated a new standard of form and expression in film, which
Delluc called 'Photogenic'.

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

Whatever the reasons were, the fact is that it is modern art,
and we must focus upon its impulse if we wish to understand
the beginnings and aims of the first avant-garde film (or, as
they were called in those days, 'absolute films'). I will present a
short outline of this development.

One of the historical impulses in modern art, the one which
forced painters out of the beautiful organic world of impressionism
into the world of the architectural forms of cubism, came (con-
sciously or unconsciously) from the vision of a style whose
elements were to be created.

The adorable individualism of the impressionists, 'L'art c'est la
nature vue par un temperament', was now to be replaced by
research into the principles of a new style. The artist became less
concerned with the representation of an object, its flavour or
atmosphere, than with its 'plastic value', with its structural ele-
ments (Cezanne believed that all forms in nature could be reduced
to the sphere, oval, square, cone and pyramid). The cubists who
followed Cezanne were themselves followed by 'abstract' artists,
who disregarded nature and object altogether in their desire to
reach a 'universal language' (Eggeling), a 'new reality' (Mondrian).

It is this general trend and ferment in art which grew during
the first World War (independently in different countries in in-
dividuals or groups not knowing anything of each other) that led
finally to the first 'absolute' films.

First Act

I spent two years, 1916—18, groping for the principles of what
made for rhythm in painting. I studied in Bach's Fugues and
Preludes the principles of counterpoint, with the help of Busoni,
and had finally found valuable clues in the 'negative-positive'
relationship, with which I experimented in painting and lino-
cuts. (Some of them published in the Dada publications, Zurich
1917-18).

In 1918, Tristan Tzara brought me together with a Swedish
painter from Ascona, who, as he told me, also experimented with

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

similar problems. His name was Viking Eggeling. His drawings
stunned me with their extraordinary logic and beauty, a new
beauty. He used contrasting elements to dramatize two (or more)
complexes of forms and used analogies in these same complexes
to relate them again. In varying proportions, number, intensity,
position, etc., new contrasts and new analogies were born in per-
fect order, until there grew a kind of 'functioning' between the
different form units, which made you feel movement, rhythm,
continuity .... as clear as in Bach. That's what I saw im-
mediately!

We decided to work together and Eggeling came with me to
Germany where we lived and co-operated for the following three
years.

Our mutual interest and understanding led to a great number
of variations on one theme or another, usually on small sheets of
paper which we arranged on the floor in order to study their
relationship and to find out their most logical and convincing
continuity, their maximum of (emotional) meaning. One day we
decided to establish a definite form of continuity in a definite way:
on scrolls. This step saved us first of all the pain of creeping over
the floor, but it gave us something else: a new form of expression
(used 4000 B.C. already). In these scrolls we tried to build
different phases of transformation as if they were phrases of a
symphony or fugue. Eggeling's first scroll was a 'Horizontal-
Vertical Mass' early in 1919, or late in 1918. Mine, at the same
time, a 'Prelude' on the theme of 'Crystallization'. Despite the
fact that the scroll did not contain more than eight or ten
characteristic transformations of a theme it became evident to us
that these scrolls, as a whole, implied movement .... and move-
ment implied film! We had to try to realize this implication.

Not many had ever come into the film so unexpectedly. We did
not know more about cameras than we had seen in shop windows,
and the mechanized technique of photography frightened us.

One day in 1920 UFA allowed us to use their animation tables.
We made a tryout with one figure of my scroll, 'Prelude'. It took
the UFA technician more than a week to animate, haphazardly,
the complicated drawing (about thirty feet long).

This first arduous experiment taught me that it would be too
difficult for our limited technical experience to translate our

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

drawings directly into film. I discontinued, therefore, the realiza-
tion of 'Prelude' and started instead to animate a set of paper
squares in all sizes, and from grey to white. In the square I had a
simple form which established by its nature a 'rapport' with the
square of the movie-screen. I made my paper squares grow and
disappear, jump and slide in well-controlled tempo in a planned
rhythm. Rhythm had inspired my making the scrolls and it
seemed more essential than anything else to follow it up even if
it hurt me to drop the well-shaped drawings of my scrolls on which
I had worked for two years. It seemed to me that our idea of
'Universal Language' asked for such sacrifice. Even with those
squares the technique was overwhelmingly difficult for me and
my first film became technically monstrously imperfect. Thumb-
tacks and fingerprints are still all over the film, but I was un-
prejudiced enough to discover that even the negative was usable
(in contrast to the white -on-black of the positive).

Eggeling was more obstinate than I. He stuck to his original
plan and filmed (his second scroll) 'Diagonal Symphony'. He was
even upset about my 'treason' as he called it, and we did not see
each other for a certain time. He filmed his 'Symphony' together
with his girl friend who learned animation technique especially
for this purpose. She was not less obstinate than he and finished
the film under the most incredible conditions.

It was at this time that we heard of a painter, Walther Rutt-
mann, who was said also to experiment with abstract forms on
film.

Second Act

When we saw the first screening of Ruttmann's Opera at Marmor-
Haus in Berlin some time later (end of 1921 or beginning of 1922)
we felt deeply depressed. Our forms and rhythms had 'meaning',
Ruttmann's had none. What we saw were improvisations with
forms united by an accidental rhythm. There was nothing of an
articulate language (which was for us, as I have shown above, the
one and only reason to use this suspicious medium, film). It
seemed to us 'vieux Jeu', pure impressionism! Yes! But on the

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

other hand, we had to admit that Ruttmann's films were techni-
cally better than ours, that he understood more of the camera and
used it. With appropriate synchronized music they would have
made 'quite nice' films, when ours were only (better) experiments.

Ruttmann used a small structure with turning, horizont aljsticks
on which plasticine forms were easily changed during the shoot-
ing. If I remember rightly, his first films were hand- coloured.
They made quite a sensation in Berlin. Neither Eggeling's nor my
films were yet shown in Berlin at that time. We had such big
things in mind that we could not imagine showing our films
publicly before a perfect stage had been reached. It was half by
trick that my friend Theo van Doesburg had gotten my first film
out of my studio. He showed it at the beginning of 1921 in Paris at
the Theatre Michel. There an old gentleman, as Doesburg described
it, looked at the title Film is Rhythm, with interest, then started to
clean his pince-nez, put it on his nose just when the film was over.

Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony was shown in his studio to
friends at about the same time. As he was never satisfied, it was
remade three times and publicly shown only in 1922, at the VDI
in Berlin, with fragments of Beethoven's symphonies as a musical
background. It was a success d'estime, but neither Eggeling nor
I got anything out of these showings and Eggeling died in 1925
embittered without having found the possibility of making a
second film (which would have revealed better than the first, with
its thin drawings, the powerful artistic personality he was).

My Rhythm 21, in its original form, was never shown publicly in
Berlin. Parts of it were incorporated in Rhythm 23 which was
shown at the first International avant-garde film show, together
with Eggeling's, Ruttmann's and French avant-garde films, at the
UFA theatre Kurfuerstendamm, Berlin, 1925. Rhythm 23 was dis-
tinguished from Rhythm 21 by the use of lines in addition to squares.

Third Act

If we felt before this International avant-garde film show more
or less as an 'avant' without a 'garde' at back of us, we did not
feel so any more after it. The existence of Entr'acte and Ballet

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

Mecanique (may be there were more films, but I don't remember
them any more) proved that we belonged to something. The
audience reacted violently pro and con. Antheil's score for Ballet
Mecanique aroused the audience and Stephen Volpe was nearly
subject to mayhem when he accompanied my film with his atonal
music.

That same year there appeared already a 'variation' of Leger's
film by Guido Seeber, an old hand of a cameraman, who knew all
the tricks. It was a commercial film for the Kino and Foto
Exhibition in Berlin (Kifo), cleverly done but far from Leger's
Ballet. A year or two later, Paul Leni together with Seeber started
also in this direction. In a slightly more expressionistic way he
produced one or two crossword-puzzle films in which the audience
had to solve the puzzle. A clever idea, but too complex to come
through. It was given up after one or two try outs.

In the meantime, Ruttmann, who had abandoned painting
altogether, had made his first contact with the film industry in
Niebelungen, by Fritz Lang, for whom he made the dream of
Kriemhild (of Siegfried's death) symbolized by a hawk, for which
Ruttmann's birdlike abstract forms were very well suited. He con-
tinued to work in film as an editor. One day in 1926 he convinced
Karl Freund (now in Hollywood), then chief of production of Fox
Film, Berlin, to tackle a big project: a documentary about Berlin.
A city seen as an individual, as a big many-sided personality.
Ruttmann came out of this task on top. Berlin, die Symphonie
einer Cross-stadt (Berlin, the Symphony of a City), showed imagina-
tion, observation and musical rhythm. The awakening of the big
city, the empty streets, alive only with a windblown piece of
newspaper, the arriving of the workers, the starting of the
machines is pure poetry and will remain. Whatever there is to say
against Berlin this film was a work of art . . . impressionistic art!
That is where the critics caught up with Ruttmann. Impressionism
was a vision of yesterday, was dead as philosophy. Berlin, vuepar
un temperament was unsatisfactory and (that is what happens
with yesterday's visions) revolting to people who had grown up
to understand more about the soul and problems of the big city
than Ruttmann showed. The splendid musical rhythm of the
pictures seemed abused and run suddenly empty in a vacuum.

Edmund Meisel's music, the first score written for a film, at

224

47. Berlin
(Walther Ruttmann, Germany, 1927)

49. Uberfall
(Ernoe Metzner, Germany, 1929)

48. Brahm's Rhapsody

(Oscar Fischinger, Germany, 1931)

50. Pandora's Box

(G. W. Pabst, Germany, 1928)

51. Blackmail

(Alfred Hitchcock, Britain, 1929)

52. Song of Ceylon
(Basil Wright, Britain, 1934)

53. Rainbow Dance
(Len Lye, Britain, 1936)

AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

least in Germany, was an additional fact that made the premiere
an outstanding event at the Tauentzien Palast, an elegant theatre
in the most fashionable shopping district of Berlin. Since the days
of Potemkin, in 1925, no other film had attracted as much public
participation. The 'Berliner' participated in Berlin. The 'absolute
film' as it was still called, was accepted.

Fourth Act

In comparison with Ruttmann, my success as film-maker was
microscopic. I had stuck to painting and to my principles. The
camera was still something strange to me, when I made my last
Rhythm in 1925. It was hand-painted and used colour as another
contrast to strengthen the expression of the movements of squares
and lines. I was still an outsider, but I got stuck with the film. An
American lady asked me to film 100 feet of 'abstract waves' which
came out beautifully (but were later cut out anyhow). It was for
a film called Hands. Albertini, an acrobat actor, a kind of early
Superman, asked for a tricky, half abstract trade-mark in motion.
To do these and other small jobs, I had to have an animation
table and camera. (The exposure at this animation table was
regulated by a bicycle pump.) After having the equipment, it
invited me to use it. In 1926 I filmed, with the occasional advice
of Endrejat, a cameraman, and the help of my wife, Filmstudy,
one of the first 'surrealistic' studies developing from one sequence
to the other by associations and analogies. It was a dream with
rhythm as the lifeline. Its meaning I don't know. It ran approxi-
mately half a reel.

The next was Inflation, an introduction to a UFA film The
Lady with the Mask, a rhythm of inflation pictures with the dollar
sign in opposition to the multitude of zero's (of the Mark) as a
kind of leitmotiv. I suppose my sponsors thought they would get
a kind of documentary, but the respect for the avant-garde at
that time was great enough to allow me any freedom I chose to
take. It certainly was not a regular documentary film. It was
more an essay on inflation. To quote Herman Weinberg in the
British Film Institute's Index to the Creative Work of Two

is 225

AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

Pioneers Robert J. Flaherty and Hans Richter: 'Here facts,
abstract forms, symbols, comic effects, etc., were used to interpret
the facts. Inflation set the pattern for Richter's later essay-films
(semi-documentaries to express ideas).' It was my first contact
with the film-industry. Up to this date I had to earn money as
newspaper and magazine editor and illustrator in order to make
films. From now on I earned enough with film-making to produce
here and there a small film for myself.

In 1927—28 I got a little film Vormittagsspuk ('Ghosts before
Breakfast*) done. It was produced for the International Music
Festival at Baden-Baden with a score by Paul Hindemith. As it
was before the era of the sound-film it was conducted from a
rolling score, an invention of a Mr. Blum, in front of the con-
ductor's nose. It did not sound synchronous at all, but it was.
The little film (about a reel) was filmed in my artist's studio in
Berlin with the Hindemiths and the Darius Milhauds as actors.
It was the very rhythmical story of the rebellion of some objects
(hats, neckties, coffee cups, etc.) against their daily routine. It
might represent a personal view of mine that things are also
people, because such a theme pops up here and there in some of
my films, even in documentaries. (Why not?) The style of the
film shows, in my opinion, more of my dadaistic past than other
films I have made. Tobis later bought the film and recorded
Hindemith's score on the early two-inch sound film, but somehow
it never was released and 'got lost' under the Nazis.

Because Inflation had been a success, other companies contacted
me to make 'Introductions' for their films, or, as the head of
Maxim Film (Emelka) put it, 'a flower in the buttonhole' to pep
up a poor film. I made Rennsymphonie (Racetrack Symphony) (one
reel) for the feature Ariadne in Hoppegarten. The fragments I still
have look today rather over-edited, but at that time it helped to
build up a specialized reputation for me. I also made dozens of
little films for publicity companies (Epoche, Koelner Illustrierte
Zeitung, etc.) In each of them I was obstinately trying out some
new problems. Zweigroschenzauber (Twopence Magic) was com-
posed exclusively of related movements of diverse objects, one
movement going over into the other, telling the 'story' of the
contents of an illustrated magazine. It translated the poetry of
'Filmstudy' into the commercial film.

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY
Fifth Act

When Vogt, Massoll and Engel, the three inventors of the 'Trier-
gon' sound patents (on which Tobis, the biggest German sound
film corporation was based) decided they were ready to have their
invention used, Ruttmann was the first to have access to it. He
recorded a little sound montage of about 300 feet, Wochenende
(''Week-end'') which is, in my opinion, among the outstanding
experiments in sound ever made and showed Ruttmann as a true
lyrical poet with untiring inventiveness. There was no picture,
just sound (which was broadcast). It was the story of a week-end,
from the moment the train leaves the city until the whispering
silent lovers are separated by the approaching, home-struggling
crowd. It was a symphony of sound, speech-fragments and silence
woven into a poem. It made a perfect story in all its primitiveness
and simplicity. If I had to choose between all of Ruttmann's works
I would give this one the prize as the most inspired. It re-
created with perfect ease in sound the principles of picture poetry
which was the characteristic of the 'absolute film'. (I heard this
piece again a year ago, it was still fresh and new and reminded me
of the poetic beginning of The Voice of Britain.)

That was in 1928. The same year, Ruttmann started Toenende
Welle (''Sounding Wave'), a short feature film and a survey of the
world of sound offered by the new invention, radio. The fact that
it was commercial did not show. I do not remember the film
very well, but do remember its surprising freshness and the fire-
men's band (or whatever it was) that marched through the city
with big drums and trumpets and appeared off and on in the film
as the place of action changed, giving it the epic flow that is so
essential to a good movie and which is always a reliable way to
give unity. Only in 1930 did Ruttmann master the full scale of
sound, when he produced another feature film which many con-
sidered as his most mature work Die Melodie der Welt ('The
Melody of the World') . It was technically speaking also a com-
mercial (one day somebody should figure out how much valuable
'experimental' work has been done in commercials that would
not have been done without them, in Nanook, Drifters and many
others). It was sponsored by the Hamburg- America Line to
encourage travel by sea. I don't know whether more people

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

travelled by sea because of this film, but it certainly moved the
audience enough to make this film a sort of a hit, and it out-'box-
officed' many non-commercials. Besides being a success it had
some unforgettable scenes. The nearly abstract symphony of ship
sirens at the beginning of the film: deep and high, long and short
in different rhythms in the harbour of Hamburg, became soon a
standard device for any film which could manage somehow to get
into the neighbourhood of a port. Pudovkin raved about this
scene, and declared it the true way of handling sound problems.
The great variety of musical themes (all over the world) with the
changing scenery (all over the world) gave Ruttmann an ideal
playground to connect musical and pictorial movements. His
good eye for the plastic value of the frame and for movement
made for good editing and such a 'sea voyage' certainly was an
editor's job if it was anything. It stimulated an audience, that,
after a lost war, a lost revolution, a lost inflation, isolated amongst
the nations, longed for a contact with the 'world'. The film had
the same faults as Berlin. It got lost in a meaningless kind of
picture-postcard montage, which Ruttmann's musical montage
technique could not overcome. It was fascinating and empty.
The frame story which Ruttmann used (the sailor leaving his girl
behind) tied the different melodies together all right, but its form-
less naturalism hurt both eye and ear. Many documentary film-
makers have in one case or another to get a device in order to tie
together unrelated sequences. I think it is better to find some
pictorial transition which keeps the flow of the pictures going (even
without an especially deep meaning), than to let a boy or a girl
or a child climb up a tree to tell a 'frame story'.

Just before Ruttmann started Melodie der Welt I began my first
sound film also for Tobis, the three-reeler Alles dreht sich, alles
bewegt sich ('Everything revolves, Everything Moves') a fantastic
documentary of a fair after a script by Werner Graeff, who also
played the leading role. The Fun- Machines and popular melodies
of a fair attracted me for their folklore as well as for the richness of
visual material and movements. Walter Gronostay, nineteen years
old when I met him in Baden-Baden the year before, was the most
understanding film composer, or should I say 'sound dramatist',
I ever met. He co-operated with me intensely to give the film the
tumbling rhythm of the merry-go-round. The boy-meets-girl (of a

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AVANT-GARDE FILM IN GERMANY

third party) story in the film was not very strong and was not
very seriously followed through. What mattered more to us was
to translate the uninhibited fun-making of the fair into real
fantasy. That the boy and the girl got sometimes lost did not
interfere with the success of the film at the opening in Baden-
Baden, but brought me

1. A contract- offer from Tobis, which was never realized.

2. A collision with two Nazis, who disliked 'degenerate art'
on the screen and beat me up. This accident came into the papers
and was two years later one of the reasons why Prometheus-Film
in Berlin hired me to direct an Anti-Nazi film Metall.

Gronostay composed later the music for many successful films
and became under the Nazis one of the top film composers — a
'Cousin Pons', who loved good food and drink so much that he
died at the age of thirty-one.

Ruttmann and I were the only avant-garde people up to
approximately 1928. No, there were the charming silhouette films
by Lotte Reiniger, begun already in 1921 as far as I remember.
She certainly belonged to the avant-garde as far as independent
production and courage were concerned. But the spirit of her
lovable creatures Prince Achmed and Doctor Dolittle seemed
always to me to belong rather to the Victorian period than to the
one which gave birth to the avant-garde in Germany and France.

From 1928—29 a new generation started to move.

Sixth Act

Where Ruttmann had left off with his abstract Opera, Fischinger,
a pupil of Ruttmann took over in 1929. A sensitive understanding
of pictorial movement helped Fischinger to synchronize Ruttmann-
like forms, abstract birds or fishes, etc., to musical melodies. The
synchronism of his films is convincing. With the help of sound the
abstract film became fulfilled. I remember with delight his
Brahms' Hungarian Dance. His films were unique because of the
solid unity of sound and picture. The forms in themselves were
quite meaningless. The films were good entertainment and very
soon readily accepted by the movie theatres. It was obviously

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Ruttmann's influence that shaped Fischinger's films. He never
overcame it. At the beginning of his career he made some excellent
publicity films. Muratti's cigarette soldiers was one of the best, in
the rather highly developed, film publicity production in Ger-
many for which Ruttmann as well as Guido Seeber and I worked
for a time. Fischinger, who insisted with admirable obstinacy
from then to now to produce nothing but 'absolute' films marked
the end of the avant-garde as far as Germany was concerned. But
as Ruttmann had transplanted his artistic experience into the
documentary field, so did others of his followers.

Wilfried Basse's Markt am Wittenbergplatz (1929) was a solid
documentary film, remarkable mainly because of his respect for
the factual. No enacted scenes but real people. It was not exactly
a critical film, but with some humour and at least not romantic,
as a matter of fact much less romantic than Ruttmann's films. The
documentary film was in those days still so far out of the normal
production scene that an honest documentary was considered
avant-garde (as Ivens, Lacombe and Grierson).

More spectacular was another, semi- documentary mostly re-
enacted film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) about
1929. It was realized by a collective of young professionals and
non-professionals, Eugen Shuftan, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ull-
mer and Billy Wilder. It was non-cliche, full of fresh observation
and experiment. It pictures the Sunday excursion to the beaches
and forests of the Wannsee (a lake near Berlin) with a love story
and all the 'trimmings'. It had the charm of an art- work, whose
creators are not yet conscious of what they were doing. It was
concerned with ordinary people and a rather collective life. Its
lack of pompousness and its documentary quality classified it as
an avant-garde picture, a name which was at that time a kind of
an 'Oscar'. The director of this very successful experiment,
Robert Siodmak, got through this film a contract from Pommer,
UFA's all-powerful producer.

Ueberfall (Accident) one reel, 1929, by Ernoe Metzner, also a
painter, was more original than the two previously mentioned
films, more 'avant-garde' in its true sense. It was a sort of mystery
story, told with the devices and experiences of the avant-garde
film (distorting lenses, tricks, etc.) plus the montage technique of
the Russians. It was the first time that a thriller was made that

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way and its technique was readily taken over into the conven-
tional production.

The three previously mentioned films had, each in a different
way, developed a new tradition: to show the ordinary man on the
screen. In So ist das Leben (Such is Life) by Karl Junghans, the
ordinary man and woman were shown in a grim realistic style
which was deeply influenced by the Russians but well translated
into the German scene. It had none of the shortcomings which
made the many 'poor people' films of that period such a painful
experience. The funeral and the funeral party, with the dance of
the drunk (Valeska Gert) to the music of a mechanical piano had
a macabre quality that reflected better than anything else in any
German film the desperation of that time.

Junghans produced the film by hook or by crook. It was a
co-operative enterprise and dragged, because of lack of money,
over years. It was the work of an artist.

Between 1929 and 1931 the unrest, which characterized the
short life of the German Republic and of post-war Europe, grew
as the economic situation became obviously hopeless.

At the first International Congress of the Avant-garde Film in
1929 at La Sarraz, the Internationale of the independent film was
founded. In December 1930, at the second Congress in Brussels,
it was dissolved after the members of all fourteen participating
countries (except Italy— Mussolini and Spain— De Rivera) explained
their desire to use the film more as a weapon in the fight against
fascism.

The time of Hitler was approaching and the tension in Europe
was so unbearable, especially in Germany, that there was, also in
film, no way out but to deal with it directly. It was at this time
that I started (for Prometheus film, Berlin) Metall, a feature
anti-Nazi-Stahlhelm film, about the metal-workers' strike in
Henningsdorf, near Berlin. It was an ill-starred venture, because
it tried to follow the political problem of the morning, which had
changed already in the evening. The script was re-written seven
times during the production and was shot partly in Henningsdorf,
partly in Russia. It was finally shelved altogether when Hitler
came into power in 1933. The film was started as a documentary
and developed finally into a full-scale fictional film. Kuhle- Wampe
(the name of a colony of barracks near Berlin inhabited by

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unemployed people just made the deadline before Hitler, in 1932.
Produced by Bert Brecht and Slatan Dudow it was not a 'poor
people' film any more, as was Such is Life, but a full-fledged
political film with a definite communistic line. There were others
of that kind in Germany but what distinguished this film was
mainly the views and dialogues of Bert Brecht, who gave the
whole film a demonic and explosive quality. The discussion about
the use of coffee (in the overcrowded train), whether coffee should
be sold under world market prices or given to the poor or thrown
into the sea, sounded then and still sounds today diabolic and
foreshadowing the world's end. It was a masterpiece of co-opera-
tion between picture editing and the content and rhythm of the
dialogue. Dudow, a Bulgarian writer, influenced by Pabst and the
Russians and most of all by Brecht, did not muster as much visual
imagination as Junghans and Metzner, and was far away from
those problems which had motivated the avant-garde.

The original artistic direction which gave the avant-garde its
meaning had evaporated. In exchange a human and social angle
had come to the surface, which could certainly be found neither
in Eggeling's nor in Ruttmann's nor in my earlier films.

Here arises again the old and still open question as to what had
to come 'first'. Is the artist's 'vision' the essential, the love for
the unknown irrational in him, which he himself can't always
rationalize, or the love for men and mankind. (The answer
cannot be but 'Yes' to both.) One cannot try to solve this
contradiction by integrating both in one's own personality! What-
ever one does or is able to do, nothing will come out of self-
violation. If one's own intuition does not lead the way, but is
forced by the neck, then art will die and with it beauty, inspira-
tion, freedom, love.

Finis

When the Nazis came to power, the name 'avant-garde' got, as
'Degenerate art', its honourable place beside modern art (where
it belonged).

Ruttmann refused to leave his 'Fatherland in such a time' as he

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wrote me in Paris, and made a film, Stahl (Steel) for Mussolini,
and later, city films (a la Berlin) for Stuttgart and for Hamburg.
(Small film of a big city.) His co-operation with the obnoxious
Leni Reifenstahl in the latter's Olympiade gave her glory and
him 'a pain in the neck'. He was a poet, but obviously not a good
judge of people and circumstances. He was killed on the German-
Russian front in 1941.

Fischinger continues to produce 'non-objective' films, now in
colour amidst a large family in Hollywood. He co-operated with
Walt Disney on the Bach sequence of Fantasia.

Robert Siodmak is one of the top directors of mystery films in
Hollywood; so is Billy Wilder.

Junghans is supposed to be in Hollywood too.

Also Metzner is in Hollywood, though not connected with film.

Brecht is in Hollywood, New York, Zurich, writing plays and
films, and Dudow is in the Russian Zone of Berlin connected with
some film production. Basse died during the war.

I myself have produced between 1930 and 1940 straight docu-
mentaries, essay films and commercials, mostly in Holland and
Switzerland. I have tried to solve the contradiction between the
social implication of the film with the 'avant-garde' in a series of
Muenchhausen-and-Candide stories, sometimes near realization
but not yet realized. I have written some books and lectured at
universities. In the United States I became director of the
Institute of Film Techniques at the College of the City of New
York. I have just finished a colour feature film Dreams that Money
can Buy, using suggestions and objects of five modern artist
friends for a large-scale co-operative, sub-financed venture that
took me three and a half years to complete. It is an avant-garde
film.

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE
IN BRITAIN

BY EDGAR ANSTEY

Caveat

SOON after accepting an invitation to contribute to a sym-
posium on experiment, the writer becomes aware how often
today's cold cliche was yesterday's sparkling quip, today's tinned
ham yesterday's ambrosia, in short, that the most accustomed act
was once a hazardous experiment. He is likely to write, therefore,
mainly of beginnings, trying to choose not only those stumbling
toddlers that grew up to be prosperous formulae rewarded in their
maturity by the ready Wardour Street cigar, but those also that
died young and bravely. If the writer is also a practitioner he is
conscious of other problems. He may one day have had preten-
sions to experiment himself. So may have had his friends. In this
case his task is hopeless. He will comfort himself for a time by
contemplating the inner rewards of the honest chronicler only to
find his honesty becoming suspect even to himself. And so he
must describe what follows as a prejudiced man's unsuccessful
attempt to avoid prejudice.

Early Work

In Britain, as in other countries, the early story of the cinema is a
story of almost continuous experiment. Few then realized even a

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tiny fraction of the potentialities of this new gadget of entertain-
ment; all the strides forward, faltering in this case, wildly, even
blindly courageous in that, were towards a goal hidden well over
the horizon and one which would have seemed fantastic to the
workers of the period. Yet the attitude to film-making, however
short-sighted, was inevitably experimental. There were no estab-
lished conventions, no time-honoured routine practices. Given the
achievement of the moving photographic image, the infinitely
varied ways of employing it could be discovered only by experi-
ment. Cameramen still working in the industry have told me that
once upon a time when they had exposed a full roll of film on a
single scene of some silent drama and the action was still incom-
plete they would peremptorily instruct the actors to remain
immobile in the positions they had reached so that the camera
might be reloaded and a second roll of film exposed. Motion would
then be resumed from the point of interruption and the second
roll of film would (they hoped) join smoothly to the first. In those
days the editing bench was simply the place where rolls of film
were joined together. It had occurred to no one that to change
the camera position during the run of such a scene would not only
assist the more palsied players but give liveliness and dramatic
emphasis to the narrative.

In choice of subject-matter, however, the early British film-
makers did sometimes show great imagination and foresight
matching the technical pioneering of such engineers as Friese-
Green and Williamson. For example, the British Film Institute
in its recent researches into the history of the British film industry
has found an 1899 film catalogue of Williamson in which
is listed a film called Country Life which appears to have been a
remarkably early forerunner of the series of films on agricultural
processes commissioned by the British Ministry of Information
during the second World War. Indeed it may well be the first
production of such a kind to be made anywhere in the world. It
is an archivist's tragedy that there appears to be no surviving
copy of the film itself. At about the same time the earliest
ancestor of the social documentary was produced in the shape of
the film (also now nothing more than an entry in the same
Hepworth catalogue) under the title The Alien's Invasion which
set itself the task of drawing attention to the appalling living

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

conditions which faced immigrants from Europe who settled in
London's dockside slums. It seems likely that the production of
this film was politically motivated and that it was not only the
first sociological documentary but the first example of direct
screen propaganda.

Such work was, however, exceptional and neither of the films
mentioned can be held to indicate any deliberately planned line
of film development; nor is there any evidence that they were
followed by other work of the same kind for very many years.
Probably the first piece of experimental British film-making to be
undertaken with a clearly previsaged goal in mind began with the
spare-time biological photography of a clerk in the Ministry of
Education. In 1908 he joined Charles Urban with the object of
analysing the processes of natural growth by means of the moving
picture camera; and it was thus that Percy Smith was to begin a
professional film career which never lost the enthusiasm, the lively
imagination, the single-minded devotion of his original amateur
days. For of Percy Smith's film-making one may write without
fear of sentimentality, that it was always to be a labour of love.
The World Before Your Eyes, The Secrets of Nature, Secrets of Life,
even the titles of his series have still a flavour of pioneering
enthusiasm.

Gradually Smith's modest home at Southgate became his
laboratory and his studio. As the years passed Mrs. Smith became
the willing victim, indeed the active assistant, in a domestic
menage adapted less to human needs than to the daily regimen of
insects and plants, members of the vegetable and animal kingdom,
whose life cycles were being recorded by means of home-made
apparatus housed in all the most comfortable corners of the Smith
home. In 1921 Smith joined H. Bruce Woolfe, who had begun
work on his Secrets of Nature films in 1919. First under the title
of Secrets of Nature, and later as Secrets of Life they brought to
cinemas all over the world a revelation of the nature of plant
and animal fife which still today remains the outstanding screen
experience of many cinemagoers. How often I have found in a
general discussion of the early days of the cinema that it is not the
mention of Ben Hur or of an early appearance of Greta Garbo
which rings the bell of memory but some still lurking image of
'one of those films showing how a plant grows'.

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

The techniques employed were simple in theory but of a
bewildering complexity in practice. The normal requirement was
for the exposure of successive frames of film at a regular interval
so calculated that when the finished film was projected, invisibly
slow movements would have been speeded up to a comfortably
informative pace. But to provide the camera-timing device was a
small part only of the problem. Normally the subject needed to be
magnified, often immensely. It must also be appropriately and
evenly lighted yet protected from over-heating between expos-
ures. It needed to be permitted free growth and yet kept within
the field of the view of the camera lens. It had to be kept alive
during a considerable overall period of photography whilst being
subjected to most abnormal conditions. Sometimes the need was
to slow down rather than to speed up movement. For example, the
flapping of a bird's wing could be analysed by the slow-motion
camera. For any and every purpose, however, it could be assumed
that Percy Smith's fertile imagination and technical ingenuity
(often assisted by Mrs. Smith's work-basket) would evolve an
appropriate device. Sometimes the fearsome machine resulting
would suggest Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg rather than the
instructional film laboratory, but the Smith machines worked (at
any rate for Smith).

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, completely absorbed in their world of
insects and plants, revealed to the outside world that mixture of
humility and determination which often accompanies high crafts-
manship. I remember the production of a malaria-prevention film
during the blitz period of the last war and how delightedly Percy
Smith announced one morning that the long-awaited emergence
under the camera of a mosquito from its pupa had at last taken
place. He then shyly suggested that its movements might have
been hastened by the violent arrival during the previous night of
a large German bomb in his northern suburb. The film exists to
record for posterity an unexpected achievement of the random
missile; indeed Percy Smith's readiness to take advantage of the
bomb's advent may well have endowed it with its only long-term
accomplishment.

Percy Smith died in 1944 and with him went one of the few
surviving links with the days of the isolated individual film-maker.
For Smith was remarkable both in himself and in the wisdom of

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

his associates who saw clearly that he must be left to plough his
own special furrow. Not that the role of the two principal of his
professional collaborators, H. Bruce Woolfe and Mary Field, was
by any means restricted to the provision of creative protection.
Without H. Bruce Woolfe the work of Percy Smith would never
have been guided in the direction which finally brought it to the
attention of such a wide public. Bruce Woolfe had himself pro-
duced films of plant and animal life for two years before the
association with Percy Smith began and during the subsequent
twenty-three years of their collaboration was to be impressario
and creative collaborator rolled into one. It was he who made
professionally practicable what would otherwise have remained
a spasmodic local enterprise.

But in any account of the experimental cinema in Britain
Bruce Woolfe can claim a place on two other scores. It was he who
was responsible for the re-enactment for the camera of certain of
the key battles of the First World War. In 1922 he made Arma-
geddon which has been described as the first of the war films. Later
came Zeebrugge and the Battle of the Falkland and Coronel Islands.
They have remained in the memories of many British cinema-
goers as examples of a type of factual film-making which came
out of the blue and for many years disappeared whence they had
come. The films were so conscientiously made that looking back
to the distant days of their distribution they seem as dramatic
and as real as Desert Victory and The True Glory. No doubt
distance lends the normal enchantment to this particular piece of
retrospective film appraisal, but whatever the differences in
technique, the courageous intention to record for posterity events
of great moment shines down the years.

Bruce Woolfe's second piece of pioneering was in the school film
field. Here, as in his guidance of Percy Smith, he was assisted by
Miss Mary Field who will be heard of again in this account of
British experimental work. In 1927 Mary Field was lured by
Bruce Woolfe from the academic field to the rough and tumble of
commercial film-making. For their joint educational productions
they came to find that they lacked nothing save a market. Yet
though the number of sub-standard projectors available in the
schools was never enough (is insufficient even today) the films
continued to be made. Bruce Woolfe and Mary Field tackled

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subjects as varied and as difficult as the English language (The
King's English, 1932) and history (Jack Holmes' Mediaeval Vil-
lage, 1936); they employed animated diagrams to elucidate such
matters as the French accent (The French '£/') and problems in
physiology ( Vision). After the initiation of a five-year programme
of production in 1934 Bruce Woolfe and Mary Field produced a
total of 239 teaching films before the outbreak of war in 1939. It
may be that only the early stages of this work can be regarded as
experimental, yet the whole plan represented a piece of courage-
ous pioneering. Sometimes the films were uncertain in their touch,
confused perhaps as to their precise pedagogic relationship with
curriculum and teacher. Sometimes the producers were obliged
by economic circumstances to seek a wider market for a film than
could be provided by a single age group arrived at the precisely
appropriate point in a subject syllabus; sometimes indeed the
original classroom purpose may have been forgotten in the search
for other more lucrative channels of distribution. But however far
the actual academic achievement may have fallen short of the
original high hopes, here was a conscientious attempt to bring the
blackboard alive and to establish a relationship between the
precept of the teacher and the practice of the world outside.

Feature Films and the Coming of Sound

Whilst new ground was being broken by educational film-makers
the lath and plaster frontiers were being driven back in the
studios. At the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914, Britain
had found herself with a flourishing film industry (which during
the war period was steadily to lose ground to American com-
petition). Yet it can scarcely be claimed that pre-war British work
was outstanding for its experimental qualities. Indeed the fictional
feature film in Britain showed few signs of novelty or originality
prior to the coming of sound. In Germany, Russia, Sweden and
to a lesser extent in the United States and France, the silent film
was regarded in influential circles as a form of art; even at its
most purposive it revealed a consciousness of the new aesthetic
of the screen. In Britain the forms were more conventional, the

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subject-matter more commonplace, and it was not until the last
days of the silent film that more original ideas began to reach the
British screen. Some of these were related to the early experiments
of the British documentary film movement which will be dealt
with later, but it is with fictional drama that we are immediately
concerned. Two names stand out amongst the experimenters of
this period and they belong to directors who are still making a
major contribution to the development of the cinema. Alfred
Hitchcock, who today in Hollywood is equally ready to employ
as protagonist a real Californian town (Shadow of a Doubt) or a
rowing-boat (Lifeboat), began his exploration of the more sinister
undertones of screen realism at Islington long before the coming
of the sound film. At the same time Anthony Asquith was de-
veloping at Surbiton and Welwyn the power of delicate charac-
terization and the ability to recreate a place and a period which
reached maturity in The Way to the Stars.

Alfred Hitchcock is a director who has always remained pre-
eminently conscious of the visual image. How frequently the
'picture' — the principal stock-in-trade of the film-maker — is sub-
ordinated to the dialogue or to the vacuous and scarcely pictorial
animation of the face of some fashionable star. Not so with
Hitchcock. From his earliest days as a director he has made it a
practice to illustrate his scenarios with a lively and colourful
sketch of each scene. Moreover, he has always made the principal
contribution to the original conception of his films in the direction
of a sharper 'pictorialization' of the theme. Hitchcock may be
said to have discovered for British films (and to some extent for
the world) the lurking drama of the commonplace. It is significant
that so many of his pictures deal with a criminal twist emerging
unexpectedly amongst ordinary people in some commonplace
urban setting. The Lodger is a significant, even a symbolic title.
The sudden translation of his melodramas to the sober setting of
a parish hall or to the decorous wonders of Madame Tussaud's
insidiously aids the Hitchcock thesis that every cupboard has its
skeleton.

The coming of the sound film might have been expected to offer
a special threat to Hitchcock's imagery. Most other directors were
in the deepest despair. The beautiful, economical eloquence of the
silent image now, they cried, was lost. The camera henceforth was

240

54. Airscrew

(Grahame Tharp, Britain, 1940)

55. Shipyard
(Paul Rotha, Britain, 1934)

56. Oliver Twist

(David Lean, Britain, 1947)

57. Crabes et Crevettes
(Jean Painleve, France)

58. Hydra

(Percy Smith, G.B. Instructional)}

59. The Fern
(Percy Smith, G.B. Instructional)

^k "•"«*

DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

to be tied to the ponderous, unselective sound recording equip-
ment; imagination would be rooted to the studio floor. The con-
tribution which Hitchcock made to the release of less optimistic
directors from this gloomy misconception has come to be symbol-
ized in a simple trick that he employed in Blackmail and which is
less remarkable in itself than in the possibilities which it revealed
(and the affection in which it is held by writers on the cinema).
Here is his trick. By repetition and the kind of camera emphasis
of which Hitchcock is a master, a domestic knife had been built up
for the heroine and for the audience as a symbol of murder. Then
as the melodramatic climax approached, Hitchcock added to the
mounting impact of the visual images a corresponding sound
image in the shape of the word 'knife', repeated with increasing
insistence from the sound track and representing the throbbing
consciousness of the weapon which existed in the mind of the girl.
The sound track was being used to reinforce the same kind of
subjective impression which at that time was a commonplace
achievement of the camera. The device was trivial but many
audiences and indeed many film-makers were for the first time
made aware of the flexibility and the potential richness of the
sound track. What had previously been regarded by so many as a
mere channel for banal dialogue or cheap music, was now shown
to be capable of subtleties which might provide for the picture a
counterpoint rather than a literal and unimaginative accompani-
ment.

Anthony Asquith was at this time experimenting more with
material than with method. Whereas Hitchcock was, and still is,
attracted by the melodramatic and the macabre, Asquith was
seeking to introduce into the cinema less spectacular material. He
had brought into films a considerable knowledge of other art
forms. His early work included Shooting Stars and A Cottage on
Dartmoor. With the coming of sound, he made Tell England,
Dance Pretty Lady and later Pygmalion. No other director has
succeeded in getting closer to the heart of the English middle
class. Asquith is at his best in portraying the quiet, ordinarily
hidden emotions of reserved young people and many of his films
have linked these characteristics with a nice observation of the
English countryside and the English country house. He was one
of the first film-makers to see a potentially rewarding relationship

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

between the film and the best traditions of that English literature
which has its roots in the domestic scene.

Avant-Garde

Neither Hitchcock nor Asquith were avant-garde directors. They
were seeking to produce intelligent films for popular audiences.
There was, however, experimental work going on in Great Britain
which paralleled the development of the 'art film' on the continent
of Europe. During the later 1920's and the 1930's the abstract
film had in many countries become a favourite field for the artist
anxious to experiment with the new film medium. In England
Oswald Blakeston and Adrian Brunei carried out work of this kind.

During this same period Ivor Montagu made three short come-
dies of an experimental nature. Comedy has rarely been the subject
of experiment in British studios, but Ivor Montagu, a film-maker
as much concerned with the economics as with the art of his
trade, broke new ground in his attempts to demonstrate that two
rising young players of imagination (Charles Laughton and his
wife Elsa Lanchester) could be used to make good satirical films.
Bluebottles, the best known of the three, employed simple stylized
settings and was by no means highbrow. The stories and situations
were, however, of less interest than the treatment.

During the early nineteen-thirties there was carried out at
Wembley Studios a certain amount of experimental puppet film
production. It was less remarkable in the quality of the films
achieved than in the training it afforded to technicians later to
become famous in many departments of film-making. Many re-
markable sequences were filmed, but the problems of organizing
this form of production were never successfully solved.

Documentary School

At the time that the avant-garde was busy with its puppets and
its abstract designs, first steps were being taken in the formation

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

of a group which was to make an outstanding contribution to
British film production and which was to do so by the experi-
mental exploration of many fields so far untrodden.

Many students of the cinema believe that the outstanding
characteristic of British films is their link with real life. It is
certainly true that many of the finest British productions have
broken away from the fictional conventions of the studio in order
to use images directly representative of day-to-day experience. It
is a matter of opinion as to how much of this factual content and
manner should be attributed to the work of the British document-
ary film movement which came into existence in 1929—30. The
precise date of birth is uncertain. One might perhaps choose the
premiere of John Grierson's Drifters when it shared the London
Film Society bill with Eisenstein's Potemkin. Yet it was scarcely
clear at this time that more had been achieved than the produc-
tion of a brilliant film of a new character. Only in Grierson's mind
as yet existed the idea of following it, not with an occasional film
of the same kind, but with the organization and training of a
whole school of film-making; the developing, in short, of what
came to be known as 'documentary', that forbidding but appar-
ently inescapable word. Grierson might have continued to turn
out a series of successors to Drifters each perhaps representing
some new advance. Had he done so they would have achieved
much less for art, for education and for sociology, than the great
volume of documentary films of all kinds which eventually were
to represent the output of Grierson's apprentices and of those film
producers and directors whom they in their turn have trained. If
the story of documentary bulks large in this narrative it is because
in its whole conception as well as in most of its individual aspects
it was — and still is — experimental. It represented an organized
attempt by a disciplined group of people to discover whether the
creative treatment of actuality could become an instrument of
social development.

Drifters was in many ways an unpretentious and indeed a
humble film. It is still a little surprising to remember the insight
which led to its immediate and widespread acceptance as a new
major work of the cinema. In the opinion of many of those
present at the original performance, the excitement it aroused
overshadowed the reception of Eisenstein's Potemkin which was

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being shown for the first time in England. The Press devoted much
space to Drifters and it appeared that a strong sea-breeze had
blown through the faintly musty halls of British screen experi-
ment. Drifters arrested the current tendency towards a non-
functional artiness in theme and style. It rejected all sentimental
or directly propagandist interpretations of its simple theme — the
catching and commercial distribution of herring. The film grasped
an ordinary phenomenon of current life and analysed it, not with
the object of making it appear extraordinary (the normal object
of screen treatment), but with the idea of integrating the dramatic
elements of its very ordinariness. Each carefully composed scene
had been tested for its fitness for the final purpose. If the camera
angle was unusual this was a means only to a clearly previsaged
end achieved eventually on the editing bench. For the total
drama of the theme was realized by the editing of sequences in a
manner more akin to the composition of music than to the editing
conventions previously accepted.

I was later to work alongside Grierson at the editing bench and
in no other way can one learn so much and so vigorously about
the whole art of film-making. For him a strip of film, a single
'shot', contains all the latent power and excitement of a brushful
of paint or a note of music, and yet, pre-eminently, it is a piece of
life which has been miraculously captured and is therefore to be
treated with all the reverence appropriate to living things. His
theories of editing owed much of course to Soviet workers, but in
developing them he showed more flexibility than the Kuleshov
school. In my own film-making career I remain proudest of a
feverish all-night session of work on Granton Trawler when, for a
storm sequence, I had worked out a somewhat complex yet lively
rhythmic pattern of sea, sky, ship and seagull which yet lacked
climactic violence. This I finally supplied by using some shots in
which, due to the severity of the storm in which the film was shot,
the camera had fallen over while its mechanism was still running
and the deck, masts and flying clouds had as a consequence
recorded some nightmare gyrations. Only a Grierson trained film-
maker (or so I like to believe) would in those formal days have
used such scrap material in the sedate service of montage.

But to return to Drifters. It had been its function to assist in
the task of 'bringing alive' the British Empire to its member

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communities. The sponsor was the Empire Marketing Board and
the decision to employ the films for its propaganda purposes was
eloquently and irresistibly advocated by Sir Stephen Tallents,
then secretary of the Board. Grierson and Tallents had soon laid
the foundations of a film-making organization which ultimately
was to provide not only the Government with its Post Office Film
Unit, its Crown Film Unit and its Ministry of Information Films
Division, but the country as a whole with a new and flexible piece
of film-making machinery. From it too were to grow the National
Film Board of Canada and the Commonwealth Film Board in
Australia, as well as documentary groups in other countries
founded or influenced by the original school.

But here we are dealing with experimental cinema and the
history of the British documentary film movement has been told
often and adequately elsewhere. For the immediate purpose it is
necessary to isolate particular growing points which may be said
to represent new departures from the original conception of
Drifters.

After its wide and successful distribution (and some following
experiment with short 'slogan' films employing abstract designs
in movement) the next important documentary step forward
came with the arrival of Robert Flaherty in England to work
alongside Grierson's young team. Grierson invited Flaherty to
join the Post Office unit with the principal object of introducing
an increased respect for the qualities of the individual film scene.
For Flaherty even today is still the world's greatest director-
cameraman. For him the making of each scene is an artistic
achievement scarcely less demanding than the painting of a
picture. Even when, as in later years, he has concerned himself
mainly with direction, his supervision of his cameramen has given
his films an individual quality immediately recognisable.

After his arrival in England, Flaherty went to the industrial
Midlands to make Industrial Britain. The choice of location was
the result of careful deliberation. For many years it had been
widely believed that many parts of Britain presented an insuper-
able photographic problem to the movie cameraman. The gloomy
tracts of Britain's industrial areas — particularly in winter — were
felt to represent a cinematic no-man's-land. But Flaherty who had
agreed to leave, not without some foreboding, the exotic settings

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in which he was accustomed to work, quickly found that from the
hills overlooking Manchester, and from the factory roofs of the
Potteries, he could make pictures which turned to beautiful
account a new photographic opportunity. Between black soot and
white steam he found an infinite range of grey shades with which
to compose his pictures. He was soon using grey smoke, drifting
mist and a glimmer of weak sun shining back from distant roofs,
with as telling effect as if he had been perched up in a jungle
palm-tree. Inside the factories too, Flaherty found as much
excitement in interpreting the skill of the English craftsman as
he had found in recording the primitive human struggle of the
Eskimo and the South Sea Islander. The way in which he would
move his camera to anticipate rather than to follow the move-
ments of a potter or a glass-blower came to be regarded by his
documentary colleagues as text-book examples of how to use the
camera as something better than a recording machine. In his film
Contact, Paul Rotha had already shown a sense of pictorial com-
position befitting the trained artist that he was, and the rest of us
no doubt had 'an eye' for a shot, but it was in camera movement
that Flaherty was able to add so much to our over-static notions.
The second land-mark in the development of documentary was
the use of the camera and microphone directly to analyse socio-
logical problems. Between 1933 and 1935, an awareness of un
employment, malnutrition, slum housing and so on was present
in the minds and consciences of large numbers of people in Britain
and, indeed, throughout the world. Yet the true nature of these
problems was understood by comparatively few of them. Journal-
ists and politicians might write and talk, but a just appreciation of
the true facts was rare amongst the people who might do some-
thing to change them. It was clear that with the coming of the
sound film, documentary film-makers had been presented with a
rare opportunity to contribute to the solution of such social
problems. Arthur Elton made a start with his film Workers and
Jobs, sponsored by the British Ministry of Labour and designed
to present the problem of unemployment not in figures but in
faces, and to give at the same time information on the machinery
which had been established to deal with the workless. This film
used real people and allowed them to give an account of their own
actual experiences. It was photographed in a Labour Exchange

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at week-ends with the help of the staff of the Exchange and of
unemployed men who were in the habit of visiting it to seek work.
In Housing Problems, made some months later by Elton and the
writer, we took the further step of discarding every remnant of
the story form, using the direct interview, stark and unadorned,
to uncover the grim daily round of the slum-dweller. To photo-
graph these citizens in their cramped, bug-ridden hovels, we took
lights, camera and microphone with some considerable difficulty
into the houses themselves. The interviews were remarkable not
for the skill of the directors or the cameraman, but because for
many audiences they provided the first direct revelation (and
incontrovertible proof) of the horrors of the slums, and the
courage, humour and eloquence of ordinary working-class people
even when living under deplorable conditions.

Without the back-street explorations of the late Ruby Grier-
son, this film could never have been made. It was her sympathy
and understanding which first made it live, thereafter it was
shaped by its actors into an account of courage amongst the
exploited which remains as a rough-hewn corner-stone for the
sociological documentary. A later film of the writer's, Enough to
Eat? (1936), should also be mentioned because it added to the
methods of Housing Problems a statistical analysis of malnutrition
presented in popular terms with animated diagrams and moving
symbols. It made use of living experts in the field of malnutrition
such as Dr. Julian Huxley (who provided an excellent commen-
tary), Sir John Orr and Lord Astor, introducing them to drive
home the film's arguments with the weight of their authority.
This technique, as will be seen later, was to be considerably
extended and developed by the work of Paul Rotha.

Films like Workers and Jobs and Enough to Eat? were certainly
not artistic in the usual sense of that word. Such aesthetic virtue
as they possessed derived from their qualities of clear exposition
and from the gray drama inherent in the facts of contemporary
life. Other documentary makers, however, were following a more
imaginative path towards a not dissimilar destination. In the
same way that Grierson had brought Robert Flaherty to England
to improve our photography, he later introduced Alberto Caval-
canti from France for the benefit of our sound tracks. It was the
role of Cavalcanti to stimulate in the younger documentary

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workers an appreciation of the power of the microphone and
more particularly of the sound mixing panel. The creative editing
of picture had already, to a large extent, been mastered by the
Grierson school, but the equal possibilities which existed in the
constructive use of sound had not been explored. Cavalcanti
quickly built up a great respect for the role of the sound-film
editor, a man working in a most complex counter-point of dia-
logue, commentary, music and natural sound. The actual sounds
of day-to-day life were given their true importance, not only to
create atmosphere but as a means of evoking what I can only
describe as an extra dimension of emotion.

Grierson and Cavalcanti showed also what might be gained by
bringing into documentary film production artists from other
fields such as Benjamin Britten, W. H. Auden and William Cold-
stream, then a young and promising painter. They collaborated
on an experimental film of this period entitled Coalface which can
justly be described as a film poem. For its effect it depended more
on sound-track than on picture, which mostly consisted of some-
what bedraggled old stock-shots. The sound-track, however, was
composed of verse by Auden and combinations of music and
appropriate natural sounds from Britten, and rhythm and cross-
rhythm were built up into a most expressive interpretation of the
sweat and strain of work underground. It is necessary to record
that at this same time also the G.P.O. Unit made a plunge into
the beguiling arms of comedy. The result, Pett and Pott, was for
many years a sore subject with both Grierson and Cavalcanti.
(Indeed it may be discovered that it remains so today.) At any
rate it calls for no further comment.

Of all our work, the film which achieved in its sound track the
most beautiful integration of music, natural sound and commen-
tary was Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon. It was in this film that
Walter Leigh made one of his most outstanding contributions to
the sound-scoring of a film, and in my opinion Song of Ceylon still
remains the world's finest example of lyrical documentary. Basil
Wright was one of the first members of the Grierson school to
show the benefits of Robert Flaherty's tuition in camera work.
The sensitive camera movements of Song of Ceylon suggest
Flaherty at his best, and Wright has added a quality of his own —
an almost mystical appreciation of the significance of certain

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carefully chosen images which he employs partly as symbols and
partly for their direct emotional effect. I have in mind particularly
the lone bird which Wright's camera follows so steadily and so
timelessly across the Ceylon jungle, and how this scene is used to
give the audience the feeling that it is spanning not merely a rich
and colourful land, but Ceylon's whole spiritual domain. Sound
and picture are beautifully combined and contrasted and the
film's characters are beautifully observed. Their emotional and
spiritual quality is built up from small carefully selected details
(forearm idly resting on knee, a dancer's thumb) in a way in
which Wright is expert. Many attempts have been made to
accomplish again what was so brilliantly brought off in this pro-
duction (unfortunately none of these new attempts by Wright
himself). Ralph Keene and Alexander Shaw in particular have
made beautiful exotic films; yet Song of Ceylon still stands alone.
It was in a sense perhaps a product of the expanding views and
the expanding optimisms of its time.

Another member of Grierson's G.P.O. Film Unit was also at
this time experimenting with the poetry of the film. In Len Lye's
case, however, the approach was a different one. In his earlier
days Len Lye had been something of a rolling stone in art,
journalism, poetry and philosophy, a gay troubadour of the
intellect, ready and indeed eager to plunge into current aesthetic
and philosophical controversy at the drop of his gay check cap,
and never known to plunge without returning to the surface with
some rare fish or, at worst, a sizeable red herring. It is typical of
Lye that he should have decided to make films without a camera.
He set to work with paper and paint brush to develop a mathe-
matical basis and a manual technique for the hand painting of
abstract images directly on to the film strip. Generally the pictorial
rhythms were determined by some familiar piece of popular
music — a piece of jazz or Latin- American dance music — and
images would be painted in synchronization with the notes and
phrases in such a way that when the film was projected the screen
would dance in a lively coloured counterpoint with the music.
Perhaps the best known of these films was Rainbow Dance which
has by now been shown to delighted audiences all over the world.
In Len Lye's footsteps followed Norman McLaren. Particularly in
his development of sound-track which he sometimes synthesizes

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by hand -drawing, McLaren has refined the technique to a
further point of grace and delicacy. His latest and best work
has been carried on in the service of the Canadian National Film
Board.

A considerable section of the documentary film movement in
the middle thirties, however, was aiming elsewhere. Arthur Elton,
in particular, had shown a flair for the film of scientific exposition
and in Aero Engine he analysed the production processes and the
testing involved in aircraft engine production with precision,
grace and an informed appreciation of the personal contributions
of the craftsmen involved. (Flaherty's influence was again most
marked in the camerawork.) It was not, however, until Elton had
reinforced his work with the beautiful animated diagrams pro-
duced by Francis Rodker of the Shell Film Unit that the full
possibilities of this type of film-making became clear. Instead of
using an army of assistants to carry out his instructions on
mountains of celluloid sheets, Rodker does much of his own
drawing actually under the camera, and this method gives his
work great smoothness and accuracy. Transfer of Power, directed
by Geoffrey Bell with Elton as producer and with diagrams from
Rodker, was a drama of technological exploration and advance.
Preserving a carefully poised balance between economic history
and scientific detail, it contrived within the space of twenty
minutes to trace the development of power transmission from the
early and primitive level to the most complicated forms of modern
gearing. Individual scenes and diagrams were beautifully com-
posed, but the real achievement of the film lay in the clarity of its
development and in the integration into a satisfactory whole of
facts widely dispersed in time and place. It is appropriate that
ten years after it was made it should remain the film of which
Robert Flaherty speaks perhaps most often and most enthusiasti-
cally. Elton's passion for precise expression which was exemplified
in this and other films depended upon the rich yet fine-drawn
camerawork of such men as George Noble, Stanley Rodwell and
Sidney Beadle. For them an internal combustion engine could
present a more stimulating challenge than a film-star's profile.

A remaining principal line of documentary experiment is per-
haps best exemplified by Harry Watt's North Sea (1938-39). In
Night Mail (for the G.P.O.) Watt had been guided by Basil

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Wright towards the development of an essentially theatrical
technique for the dramatization of actual events, a technique
which might be said to combine the visual excitements of Drifters
with the sound-track ingenuities of Coalface and Song of Ceylon,
In North Sea Watt added to this combination a story. He had
experimented with the form in earlier less successful pictures but
it was North Sea that was to ring the bell. More than that, it was
to set the style of documentary production which was to become
best known to theatrical audiences. The parts in his story were
played by fishermen and not actors. And they were asked to do
more than perform their day-to-day jobs before the camera; they
were required to imagine dramatic situations and to simulate the
emotions they would experience in them — in short, to create screen
characters not identical with their own. Non-actors had of course
been used many times before in this way (notably by Flaherty),
but in North Sea they were faced with a microphone and asked to
play out their story with voice as well as gesture and facial
expression. Most film-makers will agree that this additional
burden more than doubles the difficulty of the task. Fortunately
Watt had great confidence in his fellow-men and the ability to
treat histrionic inhibitions with a glass of beer to the point where
film-maker and fishermen were indistinguishable (psychologically
rather than physically, I should perhaps add).

It was this form of British documentary film-making which
became known all across the Allied world during the Second
World War. Watt's Target for Tonight is the direct successor of
North Sea. His actors were from the crews of Bomber Command,
his story was founded on fact, his scenes made where possible on
location, otherwise unashamedly in the studio. (The North Sea
provides a poor background for the recording of dialogue whether
you cross it in a fishing trawler or a Wellington bomber.) Other
directors and producers, John Taylor in particular, were becom-
ing expert in the story form of documentary, but it was in the
Crown Film Unit, as the G.P.O. Unit was now called, that the
bulk of this work was carried out. Its technical excellence was
largely due to the camerawork of Jonah Jones and Chick Fowle,
two lively cockney lads who started as office boys with Grierson
and finished up as the two most versatile cameramen in Britain —
as ready to flood Euston Station with blinding light for Night

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Mail as to recommend to an Allied General a more photogenic
beach for his Sicily landing.

It is questionable whether the documentary movement during
its enormous war-time activity carried out experimental work
comparable with what it had attempted during its formative
years. Perhaps indeed the situation called less for experiment than
for a great volume of output. Desert Victory, from a purely tech-
nical point of view, consolidated old ground, whilst of course
introducing the documentary method to an enormously wider
public. Nevertheless it displayed a professional assurance in its
editing which was rarer in the more tentative pre-war days. It
brought also to the notice of a wide public the work of William
Alwyn, one of the few distinguished composers of film music who
loyally continues to give much of his time to documentary.

Amongst those documentary workers who were making films
for the cinemas rather than for non-theatrical or specialized
showing, there were however a few interesting new developments.
Humphrey Jennings at the Post Office Unit during the years
immediately prior to the war introduced some of the flavour of
his surrealist painting into the handling of a number of sequences
set in drab industrial settings. I remember a film called Spare
Time in which a resplendently uniformed works band (clad mainly
in white) applied themselves to their instruments against a dark,
cold and most unresponsive factory background with a kind of
nightmare zeal. In some of his war-time films, Listen to Britain,
Fires Were Started and Lily Marlene, Jennings transferred some of
this inspired incongruity to the sound-track. A barrel-organ, a
tin-whistle became the means of evoking an other-worldly logic
at once nostalgic and sharply critical. Pat Jackson was also able
to take advantage of the now considerable technical facilities at
Crown to commit himself to the inhospitable bosom of the
Atlantic with a technicolor camera and sound-recording equip-
ment. After many months of heart-breaking difficulty he was able
to claim he had proved his point that nowhere could the real
flavour of ship-wreck be obtained but on the ocean itself. His film
was called Western Approaches and I had the happy experience in
Prague of sitting amongst the Czech audience when it was pre-
sented at the British Film Festival and slowly realizing that these
non-seafaring people were more deeply stirred by this sprawling

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picture of the fight for the Allied life-line than they had been by
the careful studio concoctions which had gone before it. The
quality of the colour photography was often uneven and the
dialogue not always easy to follow, but Jackson in this film
reminds documentary (and indeed all film-makers) that the
cinema is essentially a vehicle for revelation and that the true
image of a cold, green, lifting sea can by itself open a window on
the world. Western Approaches also reminded documentary that
sound-recording on location is a matter of skilled craftsmanship
and brought to the front Ken Cameron, a sound-recordist as
ready to experiment with his skill as the best documentary
cameramen had always been.

It may be that of late years the documentary movement has
been less successful in its alliances with leading figures in the
other creative fields. There is, however, one producer, Donald
Taylor, who has cast his net wide and his successful collaboration
with the poet Dylan Thomas should be mentioned here. Its most
important result is a remarkable but little-known film called Our
Country. In addition to Taylor and Thomas, two other leading
producers, Elton and Alexander Shaw sought to pilot the director,
John Eldridge, into harbour with his mixed cargo of pictures,
words, music and unconvention. The material defied all known
screen logic; it was countrywide in its geographical scope, it was
often breathtakingly beautiful, it was an inchoate mass of
exquisite emotion wrung from Britain at war, in which St. Paul's
Cathedral jostled with the darning of socks in a Kentish hopfield.
At first sight of the finished film and first hearing of Dylan
Thomas' difficult verse commentary many critics (including my-
self) were moved to baffled irritation. At second viewing I think
most of us felt differently. Here was after all an important film
seeking new relationships between people, places and humble
things, doing it perhaps the hard way but achieving a great deal
of its purpose. Continuity of time and place was thrown to the
winds and the film moved instead in obedience to the moods of
an improbably motivated yet warmly human sailor who was a
projection of the director's own wandering appraisal of the British
scene.

Perhaps the films made by the Shell Film Unit on the strategies
of war, films like Naval Operations, War in the East, Middle East

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and War in the Pacific can lay some claim to be regarded as an
experiment in theme and occasionally in method. As their pro-
ducer the writer can acknowledge a similarity to the three-minute
films produced before the war by Atlantic Films in Paris. A
method was, however, developed for a longer combination of
animated diagrams, models and actuality shots, these to be
woven into a survey of the situation on one of the war fronts, an
analysis of the strategical problems arising from it, and an indica-
tion of what immediate tactics and longer term measures might
be necessary to deal with the position. Some of these films were
made at high speed in order to inform theatrical audiences all over
the country of an important change in the war situation. War in
the East, for example, took no longer than ten days from start to
finish. It enabled Japan's declaration of war to be followed within
a fortnight by a thorough official screen analysis of the new
strategical position which had arisen.

Other expositional film-makers went from their investigations
of scientific theory to the making of instructional films on new
weapons and new war-time practices. R. Neilson Baxter's work at
the Shell Film Unit on films about anti- submarine warfare and on
Radar is especially worthy of notice, and demonstrated often
great brilliance in visual analogy. In these films Francis Rodker's
diagrams did much to help many a young naval officer over the
scientific hurdles presented by the complicated new devices. The
work of the Technicolor Laboratories at this time was also as
remarkable as it was secret. Charles Tomrleg and George Gunn
in their training films used new techniques designed to put the
trainees into the position of the man behind an anti-aircraft gun.
As the image of an aircraft passed across the foreground silhouette
of the sights, they could assess and develop quickness and
flexibility in selecting the instant at which to press the trigger.

Paul Rotha's early work in such films as Contact and Face of
Britain had been more concerned with visual beauty than with
sociological exposition. During a period of work in New York,
however, he became interested in the 'Living Newspaper' tech-
nique of the Federal Theatre and, as a result, was encouraged to
develop the process of sociological analysis which British docu-
mentary had explored earlier in Enough to Eat? He added to it
his own virtuosity as one of the screen's great editors and an

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element of directorial interpretation designed to heighten the
emotional content. In his films on food, World of Plenty and The
World is Rich, and his film on British housing, Land of Promise,
Rotha combines Isotype diagrams, fictional illustration, expert
opinion, historical re-enactment and actual camera evidence of
historical fact into a carefully composed piece of non-fictional
drama which is as mindful of its emotional climaxes as is the most
popular piece of escapist melodrama. It may be argued of these
tight-packed and tautly-strung films that the intellectual level
has been set a little too high and that objectivity of judgment is
sometimes lost, but it remains true that in his courageous and
always imaginative tackling of forbidding economic themes,
Rotha has made one of the very few completely individual contri-
butions to the art of the cinema, and on an international scale.

Before leaving the field of documentary experiment I should
mention the records of psychiatrists' interviews contained in
Geoffrey Bell's two films on Personnel Selection in the British Army.
To obtain them two sound cameras and the necessary lighting
equipment were brought into the psychiatrist's already cramped
office and after a short period of adjustment it was found that
psychiatrist and soldier were able to talk naturally and reveal-
ingly . One camera's field of view encompassed the two men while
the second moved in close-up from face to face. The need to avoid
rehearsal and the consequent uncertainty as to the length and
line of the discussion meant that several rolls of film had often to
be run off without interruption and the cameras alternately re-
loaded. Meanwhile the psychiatrist continued to probe back into
the soldier's memory for the original causes of some existing
mental ill- adjustment. On the screen the man's mind opens as if
it were a flower under Percy Smith's botanical camera. It may
well be that a screen examination of the records of such interviews
would provide the psychiatrist with data not obvious to him
during the interview itself. Realist Film Unit under the general
direction of John Taylor, notably assisted by Adrian Jeakins,
Margaret Thomson and Brian Smith has carried out related work
on the behaviour of children. Here again a successful attempt has
been made to record spontaneous behaviour, often with concealed
cameras.

A recent achievement is the little-known film Chasing the Blues.

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It was made co-operatively by the Data Film Unit in which
Donald Alexander and Jack Chambers are the principal pro-
ducers. Chasing the Blues is intended by the Cotton Board to en-
courage mill managers to cheer up their mills with a little more
attention to the general environment of the workers. It is a film
ballet of music and movement, owing something to Len Lye, but
more to the emancipation of its makers from the normal inhibi-
tions of industrial welfare -working. The feeling as well as the fact
of cleanliness is imparted by white-washers leaping gracefully
from wall to wall. The film calls for cleanliness by its clean lines
of movement, for vigour of action by its own vigorousness and
for an imaginative approach to the worker by its own imaginative
approach to the employer.

Screen Magazines

The vigilant reader may have observed that this account of
British experiment so far contains no reference to the work of the
newsreels. The sad fact is that here, as in other countries, they
can lay small claim to originality. Indeed, since the initiative
displayed in the filming of Queen Victoria's funeral in 1901 and
the remarkable coverage of the Delhi Durbar in colour in 1912,
news-reels have been content to jog along week by week, conform-
ing with a well-established and universal pattern of presentation.
There is more, however, to be said about the allied field of the
screen magazine. In the late nineteen-twenties Andrew Buchanan
originated his Cine-magazine which he continued to make and
distribute for many years. It contained within a reel several two-
to four-minute items of popular journalistic interest, some light
and amusing, some of a serious documentary character — how to
blow glass, the perils of a window-cleaner's life and so on. The
Cine-magazine was perhaps most memorable for the method with
which sequence was linked with sequence, sometimes it is true by
a cheap pun but occasionally by more subtle visual means.
Andrew Buchanan had no high-brow purpose in mind; he was
seeking to entertain his audience by applying a light touch to
serious, mundane, even dull matters, and by hard work and

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considerable enterprise he succeeded in capturing for his own a
well-respected corner of the cinema programme.

A later development was inspired by the success of the American
magazine the March of Time. Instead of following the same
formula Ivan Scott developed an alternative method for the
presentation of controversial subjects of economic, social or civic
interest. He himself appeared as the visible chairman of a round-
table conference between 'Mr. Pro' and 'Mr. Con' and the three
men would thrash out the issue in question aided by screen
illustration of the points they made. The method frequently
achieved vigour of treatment but failed to establish itself with a
wide audience. It was from British sources, however, that the first
important rival to the March of Time was in due course to
develop. John Grierson and Stuart Legg launched under the
auspices of the National Film Board of Canada a monthly maga-
zine called the World in Action, which frequently went deeper for
its arguments and wielded them more resolutely than has March
of Time in recent years. The magazines were similar in general
style but the World in Action depended sometimes over-much on
library material of dubious quality. The compensation was that
the well-worn scenes often proved to be quite brilliantly appro-
priate, and because of this careful selection of images and Legg's
skill as an editor and commentary writer, the World in Action
developed finally a greater emotional power than March of Time.
Unfortunately its production came to an end with the resignation
of Grierson and Legg from their Canadian posts.

More recently in Britain the J. Arthur Rank Organization has
launched a similar monthly magazine under the title of This
Modern Age. Whilst it still often lacks that dramatic power which
can come only from experience of the full power of the editing
bench, it has been consistently well photographed and has shown
commendable readiness to tackle seriously and honestly such
tricky current issues as coal-mining, the problems of Palestine
and the future of the Sudan. For my taste, however, both World
in Action and This Modern Age have adhered over- slavishly to
the picture -commentary formula. To introduce characterization
and dialogue may well mean a certain loss in tempo, but the gain
in warmth and human contact would surely prove more than a
compensation.

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

Africans and Children

It is necessary somewhere to report the remarkable work of
George Sellars of the Colonial Film Unit. It has been his task for
many years to assist in the education of Africans remote from the
amenities and indeed the associations of our own form of civiliza-
tion. Aided by his years of experience in Africa he has evolved a
technique whereby the film is rendered suitable for audiences
baffled by its normal conventions. Sellars has found it necessary
to be rid of such devices as the dissolve and the unexpected
camera-angle and to reduce to a minimum the cutting from scene
to scene (which he has found represented for many Africans a
complete break in the narrative). He has built his films on the
assumption that the eye of an African inexperienced in metro-
politan life will pick out in any city scene only those objects with
which it is familiar. In a street of traffic, for example, only a dog
may be visible to remote and isolated audiences which have never
seen a bus. Sellars has now pioneered with his films to a point
where his techniques are ready to help with the pressing task of
providing fundamental education for the great populations of
Africa and other under-privileged territories.

This work is not unrelated to the recent experiments of Miss
Mary Field in the production of films designed specifically for
audiences of children. These are for the most part story films
about young people; they employ simple situations readily to be
understood and bring back to the screen some of that quality of
adventure which was the principal attribute of the early Western.
Miss Field's work has been criticized. Some of the films have been
described as priggish and some have been held to adopt an adult
rather than a juvenile approach to moral problems. On the other
hand a few of the more recent of her productions — in particular
Bush Christmas, directed by Ralph Smart in Australia — have been
widely praised. It is early yet to assess final results, but it is certain
that the intelligent production of films for children will solve one
of the cinema's greatest problems — the size of the potential child
audience and the failure hitherto to cater for it.

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The Modern Fiction Film

If we are to examine experimental developments in the feature
fiction film during the period immediately prior to the war and in
subsequent years we must turn in our tracks. As always in these
matters, one is on the thin ice of personal opinion, but from the
early years of the sound film, from the time that is when Hitchcock
and Asquith were making the contribution already noted, I am
aware of little that was new until John Baxter made his uncon-
ventional claim for attention. His early work is not well known.
He believed in substituting for high production expenditure his
technical ingenuity and a special knowledge of his subject-matter.
His study of the down-and-out population of London led to the
making of Doss House, and many of his films have shown a special
concern for the poor. It was not, however, until the production of
Love on the Dole in 1941 that it became clear to a wide public that
a British feature film director had emerged with strong and out-
spoken views on social questions. The film was, of course, the
screen version of Walter Greenwood's successful play, but Baxter
was doing much more than point a camera through a proscenium
opening. The film version showed insight into working-class
character and an unprecedented ability to recreate amongst
studio sets some of the real feeling of slum life. In a later film,
The Common Touch, the story throws rich and poor together in a
series of evocative situations and here John Baxter contributed
his own social and political ideas. It is a film which received less
attention that it deserved. Baxter returned for his setting to the
London locale of Doss House, but he added to the realism of that
production a curious and individual quality of fantasy and of
lyricism. It may be argued that the film fails in reaching no hard
and fast political or even sociological conclusions. It has been
called merely sentimental in its implicit call for a recognition of
brotherhood beneath the badges of society. Yet the rich colour of
its characterization and the gusto of its symbolism gives the film
some of the simple wisdom of a mediaeval allegory.

The British feature film made great strides during the later
years of the war. For many of us a foretaste of things to come was
provided in 1943 by the appearance of Millions Like Us, a film
written and directed by Frank Launder and Sydney Gilliat. Much

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of the credit for the original idea of this film must go to the
Ministry of Information, who did a great deal to encourage its
production. It was a drama of the factory front, an examination
of the emotional interplay of a group of people drawn from
different levels of society and brought together for a common
effort at the factory bench. Technically, it was remarkable for its
use of real factory, canteen and hostel interiors, and for its
naturalistic portraits of the workers portrayed. It was on the
whole unsentimental and took a realistic view of the social
problems involved rather than minimizing them as was then
common in the more superficial forms of factory-effort propa-
ganda. Millions Like Us proved to be a popular film and did
something to persuade the film trade that there was a case for the
documentary handling of real material even in entertainment
films primarily designed to be viewed through the box-office
grill.

Not long afterwards Millions Like Us was followed by a film
which still in my opinion remains the greatest of all films about
Britain at war. This was Noel Coward's naval film In Which We
Serve and it also broke new ground. No doubt that in ranking it
so high I shall bring wrath upon my head. Much criticism has
been directed towards the allegedly snobbish handling by Noel
Coward of the principal role; the film has been held to contain a
plethora of Service sentimentalities. These faults, such as they
are, are in my opinion more than balanced by the handling of the
working-class sequences in Portsmouth and by the integration of
the film's separate episodes into a brilliant whole. The devices
employed were not in themselves often original (an exception was
the shimmering liquid dissolves to carry the action away to dry
land from a starting-point in the minds of the characters adrift
after the sinking of their ship). But the technical instruments of
film-making have never been in my opinion so justly used, each
in the right place and each in the right degree. It may be held that
these are qualities of maturity rather than of experiment, yet the
underlying purpose of the whole film was new in that it attempted
to present at one and the same time the citizen both as a civilian
and as a service-man. This task became so fundamental to later
screen propaganda that it is easy to lose sight of the importance
of its first achievement. With the possible exception of The Way

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Ahead, it may even be argued that it was done best when it was
done first.

This Happy Breed, a second film of Noel Coward's, also claims
inclusion. Here again there was great sensitivity in the handling of
a lower middle-class family, but the use of colour in a film essen-
tially drab in its setting was even more striking. Many of the best
sequences were those portraying the more tawdry and sordid
sides of suburban life, and yet colour was as effective here as in
some rare exotic setting.

That Noel Coward's excursion into film production should have
proved so successful has caused much speculation. No doubt a
great deal of the credit for the technical excellence of his films
must go to David Lean, who was later to make his mark on his
own in such outstanding British productions as Brief Encounter
and Great Expectations. Yet it appears likely that Coward's own
contribution is a considerable one. Much of his success in the
theatre has been due to his ability to catch the national mood and
the national need with an appropriate theme and treatment. He
is perhaps more sensitive to the atmosphere around him than are
more cloistered creative workers. The success of his films may well
indicate a special sense of what is timely, an attribute more im-
portant perhaps in the cinema than in other fields of art. The
screen evidence suggests, too, that Coward is not hidebound or
convention-ridden in his handling of the film medium; that he is
well aware of its flexibilities and the possibilities it offers for
originality of treatment.

British film production has almost always been notoriously
weak in comedy. There was, however, towards the end of the war,
a first sign of the development of a British school of screen
humour with truly national characteristics. Unfortunately it can-
not be claimed that anything better was made than a humble and
apparently abortive start. At the time of writing, what once
seemed the exhilarating beginning of a long-awaited event, looks
instead like a brief flash in the pan. The two films I have in mind
— On Approval and Don't Take It To Heart — were both associated
with Geoffrey Dell, an author and playwright who had written
satirically about the British film industry. On Approval, based on
the Lonsdale play, had a chequered history in production, but a
studio ugly duckling grew up into a very lively bird indeed.

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Although the comedy of manners is never easy to handle on the
screen this film found humour and satire not only in the perform-
ance of the actors but in the whole conception of how the story
was to be handled cinematically. The position and movement of
camera, the editing and particularly the sound score had been
modified and adjusted to the special demands of comedy. The
same qualities were even more marked in Don't Take It To Heart,
a most witty satire on country life amongst the English aristoc-
racy. I found in this film many moments of which Rene Clair at
his best would have been unashamed. It would appear that
neither On Approval nor Don't Take It To Heart sufficiently im-
pressed the film trade to warrant the production of further
similar films. Or there may well have been other reasons for the
fact that their undoubted artistic success was not followed up.
Here, however, is one of those problems of film industry economics
which my present terms of reference certainly demand that I
eschew.

More recently striking progress has been made by British
feature films in quite another direction. One of the best known
experimental films in the world is Laurence Olivier's Henry V. I
have heard it acclaimed by audiences (and equally by film-
makers) in Prague and in New York. In Venezuela I have been
anxiously asked by an official of the Ministry of Education when
they might expect the long-awaited arrival of this almost legend-
ary masterpiece. Indeed, in spite of its predominantly literary
character, it has become in many quarters a symbol of British
film-making. Much of its success is more attributable to the
magnificence of the language than to filmic qualities. Yet it does
contain many most stimulating and provocative technical devices.
Some arise from the attempt to distinguish between the players
at the Globe and the characters they portray; others from the
stylized scenic backgrounds which suggest the period of the play
and at the same time remind us that it is being played in a theatre
of a different period. These are points perhaps better appreciated
by the scholar than the common cinemagoer and it is true that
much of the experimentation has to do with the presentation of
Shakespeare in a novel manner rather than the expansion of the
powers of the film medium, but it does certainly suggest a new

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and fruitful relationship between the screen and the masterpieces
of the theatre.

Today the British film industry appears to be in what may be
described as a belated classical period. With dignity and grace it
is attempting to transfer to the screen some of the masterpieces
of its literature. To do so is not necessarily to experiment and, in
Caesar and Cleopatra, for example, there was little sign of the will
to match great expenditure with equivalent imagination in the
use of the medium. Nor, in my opinion, is Sir Alexander Korda's
earlier filming of H. G. Wells to be ranked as an experiment save
perhaps in the wise yet revolutionary freedom he accorded to the
composer of his musical scores. In Great Expectations, however,
particularly in its opening sequences, David Lean has done more
than simply film Dickens. He has tried to transmute the
essential qualities of the novel into the dramatic terms of the
cinema. The gasps of sudden horror with which audiences greet
the capture of Pip in the churchyard by the escaped convict would
have delighted Dickens himself, and this nightmare effect,
achieved by words in the novel, is here communicated by the
ingenious use of a wide-angled lens and a full appreciation of the
dramatic potentialities of the cutting bench. Real attempts are
made in the film to present the subjective points of view of its
characters. With attempts less obtrusive than those of Citizen
Kane and The Magnificent Amber sons, David Lean has kept close
to the spirit and period of the original work, whilst bringing
up-to-date the special nature of its dramatic impact.

A similiar technical virtuosity is to be found in David Lean's
later film version of Oliver Twist, while in Hamlet, as was expected,
Laurence Olivier has developed to a further point his theories on
the filming of Shakespeare. Harry Watt's second expedition to
Australia may be expected to yield a worthy successor to The
Overlanders, a film which requires attention here on its own
account. For Watt's star in this film was Australia. In spite of the
beautiful young horsewoman on the advertisement hoardings the
public queued up to see the horse. The great open spaces had at
last reached the screen unpeopled by the old familiar Hollywood
faces and it was found that Mother Nature brought with her
enough drama of forest fire, cattle stampede and perilous moun-
tain crossing to persuade even the cinema exhibitor that life was

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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN

wonderful. It was a triumph not only for Watt but for his producer
Michael Balcon. Over the years Balcon has tried harder than any
other British producer to bring the film industry down to earth.
His San Demetrio, London (directed by Charles Frend) re-enacted
the famous war-time story of a salvaged tanker with an accuracy
and depth of feeling which I think could have been achieved in no
studio except Ealing, where honesty of purpose has become adept
in overcoming the handicaps of lath and plaster.

The claims to a place in this account of British experiment of
such films as Powell's and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and
Death and Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is a matter of controversy.
It may be argued that each of them breaks new ground in theme
and treatment. On the other hand there is, I think, more to be
said for the view that they are eclectic films in the sens ethat they
borrow widely and perhaps not too discriminatingly — a piece of
spectacular Hollywood here, a touch of Teutonic defeatism there,
the whole varnished over with a shining competence by craftsmen
who are masters in the handling of the tools of their trade. This is
not to say that the work of Powell and Pressburger and of Reed is
not amongst the most important at present emanating from
British studios. Nor is it to argue against the mature mastery of
Sir Alexander Korda. It may be said that these film-makers,
together with Launder and Gilliat (now more sophisticated and
perhaps less exciting than in the days of Millions Like Us) pro-
vide much of the basis for the high reputation of British fictional
films. Yet there remains a danger that the foundations they have
laid may be more suitable for the erection of a second Hollywood
than for a temple of British screen art.

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To Sum Up

Is there any general pattern of development emerging from this
survey of British experimental production? It is clear that in the
non-fictional field the British achievement has certain character-
istics which have less to do with the content and manner of
individual films than with an attempt to organize cultural and
educational film production as a socially valuable whole. I have
tried to record something of the outstanding work which H.
Bruce Woolfe has done in gathering together educational film-
makers and in trying to provide them with an opportunity to
relate their special skills with the needs of the educational system.
Later came John Grierson to subordinate his own very remark-
able abilities as a film-maker to the need to plan documentary
film production not simply as the source of an occasional out-
standing film but as a social instrument. It may be said that this
policy has deprived us of masterpieces from the pioneers. Yet no
country in the world during the Second World War was able to
make more effective use of the film for propaganda and instruction
than was Great Britain. Moreover, there is no reason why, in the
equally critical post-war period, this British advantage need be
lost. Here is a justification of the Grierson policy which will satisfy
all of us except those who rate the claims of art before those
of social organization. And that, I must insist, is another story.
To find a pattern for British fictional film experiment is a more
difficult matter. There has certainly been a tendency to relate
much of the best work to standards of realism, yet British film-
makers can scarcely now claim to be in the van in this kind of
production. Film-makers in Italy, Germany, even in the United
States, are getting closer to life than seems now possible within
the walls of British studios. There has been noticeable also a
certain 'aestheticism' in much recent British work. Too many
British films are all head and little heart. Is this a necessary stage
in the development of a more mature form of film-making? Or is
head before heart, cart before horse? What is eventually to
emerge from the present phase, marked as it is by remarkable
intelligence and profound knowledge of the medium, would take
a bolder critic, a shrewder financier and a wiser politician than
I am to predict.

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BY JOHN MADDISON

'Having laid bare the heart of a living animal, they pointed the
camera lens towards it, and left the shutter open. The images they
obtained made a double outline, representing the extreme positions
taken up by the heart. At these moments, indeed, the heart remains
motionless for an instant and its form is recorded on the sensitive
plate . . . .' — Marey (about 1882) on the work of the physio-
logists Ominus and Martin.

latterly, critics OF THE FINE ARTS have been discovering the
revealing powers of the motion picture camera in their own field.
'It sets fire to everything', says one of them. This is flamboyant
language, and in the experimental sciences the potentialities of
the camera and its excitements would no doubt be more soberly
described. Yet even before the invention of cinematography, the
camera's extraordinary powers for observing and recording move-
ment were recognized; in 1874 Janssen had photographed from an
observation point in Japan the transit of Venus, and in the 1880's
Marey had pursued his series of researches into animal movement.
In their case, the camera-gun was a weapon for analysing the
movement of planets, birds, horses and men walking, running and
bicycling. The efforts of Lumiere, Edison, Paul and others pro-
vided an instrument able not only to analyse but also to put
moving phenomena together again on a screen. Since then, refine-
ments of camera mechanisms, lenses and emulsions, have given
the investigator a fascinating new mastery over time-scales and

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dimensions. Nearly half a century of scientific cinematography
has brought many revelations of the beauty and harmony of the
physical universe, and some notable extensions to our knowledge
of it. But the story is not a coherent one. Mainly, it concerns the
individual achievements of outstanding pioneers and teams of
workers. If cinematography is to become what it should be, a new
international language, lucid, gracious and disciplined, for record-
ing and interpreting science, a number of obstacles must be over-
come. Some of these are purely economic; some are inherent in
the youthfulness of the medium. None is insuperable, and of
recent years an encouraging pattern of co-ordination has been
slowly emerging. In some countries, for example, Britain, France,
Belgium, Canada and Switzerland, organizations have been
voluntarily set up to support, and to enlarge the scope of,
scientific cinema. Most important, representatives of twenty-two
countries met in Paris in the autumn of 1947 to create an inter-
national association which aims at linking and extending effort
and achievement throughout the world.

For brilliant and sustained experiment, one must begin with
the biological sciences and with two cinematographers, whose
origins were sharply contrasted. Some forty years ago, the cinema
laid its allurements on two young men. One, Jean Comandon,
was a student at the Paris School of Medicine, preparing his
doctor's thesis on the spirochaete of syphilis. The other, Percy
Smith, was a clerk at the Board of Education in London, with a
passion for natural history. With both of them (Smith died in
1944, Comandon is still working at the Pasteur Institute of
Garches) their attachment to the cinema remained lifelong.

Though during the First World War he made anti-T.B. propa-
ganda films, Comandon's chief contribution has been the patience
and ingenuity with which he has combined cinematography and
other techniques of visual investigation. One of his first films,
remarkable in its day, employed Rontgen rays; he is, therefore,
a pioneer of cineradiography. But it is in bringing together the
cinecamera and the microscope that he and his assistant, de
Fonbrune, have shown their greatest skill. Since 1929 they have,
in their cinelab oratory at Garches, solved many delicate problems
in the lighting, protection and manipulation of living cells and
other micro-organisms. The Garches cinemicro graphic equipment

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EXPERIMENT IN THE SCIENTIFIC FILM

is, indeed, a unique engineering achievement. Comandon is able
to demonstrate, with superb visual clarity, his surgical operations
on micro-organisms by means of two other pieces of equipment
devised at Garches; the micro-forge, in which infinitely tiny
surgical instruments, scalpels, hooks, etc., are fashioned, and the
micro-manipulator, which scales down enormously the action of
the human hand as it moves at will the living organisms beneath
the microscope for the camera to record. The results of Coman-
don's work on the screen — this remote and tiny drama of move-
ment and change — are often breath-taking, even to the non-
specialist. But it is important to remember also that Comandon
is a member of a research institute; such works as Champignons
Predateurs and Greffes de Noyau d'Amibe have contributed to
the common store of our knowledge of biological phenomena.

For a cinema technician of an entirely different order, Georges
Melies, the cinema's main attraction was, he said, that it was
'handwork'. There can be no doubt that this was also true in the
case of Percy Smith. Those who have visited his house at South-
gate all speak of the ingenious film machinery to be found there,
and of Smith's flair for creating these devices, often with his own
hands, out of the most unexpected of materials — dripping water
moved the first machine he built for filming plant life. Though his
achievements in what he and his collaborators Mary Field and
H. V. Durden have called Cine-biology were of high quality, it
was mainly in the use of speeded-up cinematography for register-
ing plant growth that his contribution to the scientific film lay.
As Bruce Woolfe, with whom Smith began to work in 1921 on the
Secrets of Nature films, has remarked, his botanical films opened
up fresh possibilities to the cinematograph camera. These films
were made in collaboration with Dr. E. J. Salisbury, who has
pointed to another important aspect of Smith's peculiar talents.
'It was in the patience necessary to ascertain the precise phase of
a phenomenon that best lent itself to pictorial record that Percy
Smith exhibited so high a degree of skill, almost amounting to
genius.'

Besides the stop-motion work in which Smith excelled, high-
speed cinematography can be combined with the microscope to
produce records only available through film. At the 1947 Paris
Scientific Film Congress, the zoologist, Storch of Vienna, presented

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with wit and enthusiasm slow-motion cinemicrographic studies of
freshwater animalculae. In this same field, an immense step for-
ward has been taken by combining the cinema camera with a
new kind of microscope — the phase-contrast microscope. This new
technique is particularly valuable for the study of transparent
micro-organisms. Its most spectacular use has so far, to my know-
ledge, been in the German film made by Zernicke of Jena about
the division of the sperm cells of a grasshopper. This film was also
shown in Paris in 1947, together with three research records using
both phase-contrast and polarised light by Hughes of the Strange-
ways laboratory in Cambridge. Hughes' work is based on the
techniques originally developed by Canti at Bart's in the 1920's
and early 1930's, but the newer methods have greatly increased
the scope of the cinematography of living tissues and opened up
important new possibilities both for research and for demonstra-
tion films. It is, to my mind, not yet sufficiently developed as
cinematography, and he needs, and should get, encouragement
and support from professional film-makers and film-making
organizations.

The motion picture camera is immensely flexible and a constant
and untiring observer of nature. It can register, with an authenti-
city which continually surprises, the nuances of life. It gives us
the power both to compress and to magnify time. If its most
widely-known applications have hitherto been in the field of
biology, there can be no doubt of its usefulness in the other
sciences. Some of the striking applications of high-speed cinema-
tography to the physical sciences still presumably lie shrouded in
the archives of war. In astronomy, Leclerc has shown how reveal-
ing speeded-up cinema records of Solar eclipses and other
phenomena can be. The films he has made with the collaboration
of the eminent astronomer Lyot, in the Caucasus and in
Sweden and at the Pic du Midi observatory, are contributions to
science as well as being dramatic portrayals on the screen. It is a
sad comment on the economics of scientific film-making that
Leclerc, in order to earn a living, has had to give up this work and
to join a news-reel company. Watson Watts' use of the same
speeded-up technique for the study of cloud formations in The
Story of a Disturbance demonstrated another potential use of the
camera devised by Frank Goodliffe. The only other example of

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this sort of cloud study I have seen has been a Kodachrome
record made in America in which, against a blue sky, white
clouds perform an amusing and ultimately rather monotonous
Ride of the Valkyries.

A pre-war German film uses an entirely different technique of
research and demonstration in meteorology; authentic weather
charts covering all stages of a disturbance are animated by
cartoon methods. The resulting mobile patterns provide an
absorbing spectacle. Few of the many films made in Germany,
by UFA particularly, have been available in Britain.

There are other less obvious fields in which the film camera can
both increase the sum of our knowledge and fire the imagination.
Germaine Prudhommeau's La Reanimation des Danseurs de la
Grece Antique uses the camera to investigate a problem in archae-
ology. Figures on Greek vases and in friezes have been made to
dance, as the Greeks might have done centuries ago, by the em-
ployment of the ordinary techniques of the animated cartoon.
Animated drawings can also provide us with moving patterns to
reflect mathematical concepts. How exciting these can be visually
Kysela of Prague has recently demonstrated with his film The
Hyperbole. The pioneer in this field has, of course, been Robert
Fairthorne and it is a pity that he has not continued the experi-
ments he began before the war. For him, the film has a place of its
own amongst visual aids because the events it can create are free
from the laws of mechanics. In the social sciences, the main contri-
bution has come from the British school of documentary, but the
long series of psychiatric studies made by the U.S. Army Medical
Services reveal the hidden motion-picture camera as a sensitive
and illuminating instrument for recording human reactions.

It is usual to think only of research and investigation, when
one speaks of experiment in the scientific film. But experiments
in the presentation of scientific data, in relating the achievements
of science to society and evaluating the consequences of progress
for the citizen, all these are of equal importance. Percy Smith's
work, for example, was remarkable, not only as research, but also
because it represented an attempt lasting over twenty-five years
to interpret science to the ordinary cinemagoers. Experiment in
the presentation of science can take a number of forms, and it is
in this respect that the documentary school founded by Grierson

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has from the beginning sought to establish links between the
specialist and the technician and the general public. To my mind,
two films from this school are outstanding demonstrations of
documentary's power to interpret science. The first is Elton's and
Bell's Transfer of Power, in which within the space of twenty
minutes the story of the evolution of a technical device is not
only told with lucidity and coherence but is related to the social
pattern. In Blood Transfusion, Rotha and Neurath drive home the
point, with an ingenious bringing together of actuality, models
and animated drawings, that scientific achievement is a co-
operative international business. With his two films about world
food problems, World of Plenty and The World is Rich, Rotha has
gone on to show that he is the most internationally minded of all
our film-makers. The work of British documentary technicians
in using films as a mass educational technique under Government
and other sponsorships, and its offshoots in Canada and elsewhere,
is too large a theme to be developed here. But its importance is
twofold. It has illumined the social function of science in countless
ways. In Enough to Eat, Housing Problems and Smoke Menace, it
first afforded a pulpit to such progressive interpreters of science
as Huxley, Haldane and Boyd Orr. In war, it demonstrated
with Potato Blight and Scabies and a hundred other films how
laboratory findings and specialized techniques could be given a
wider currency. More recently, Personnel Selection — Officers and
Children Learning by Experience have shown how the camera can
expound attempts to apply objectivity and good sense to the
more delicate problems of human behaviour. Not less important
than the new techniques of production explored has been the vast
non-theatrical experiment in distributing films to audiences
outside the commercial movie houses. Fresh images of scientific
achievement have been carried into schoolroom, workshop, byre
and forest clearing and the thousand and one places where men
meet together.

Perhaps only in the Soviet Union has there been anything
approaching this in scale and continuity. The Soviet scientific
films we have been privileged to see indicate how great a function
of their specialized studios is the popular interpretation of science.
Unfortunately, examples of films from the USSR of direct
scientific interest seen by audiences in Western Europe have been

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too few — Experiment in the Revival of Organisms, Artificial
(Esophagus, In the Sands of Central Asia, a handful of others, and,
many years ago, Pudovkin's Mechanics of the Brain.

Some film-makers have also begun experimenting in the study
of art through the medium of the motion picture. Films showing
the development of an artist's career like Michelangelo (German),
studies of individual works as in Giotto (Italian) and Paul
Haesaerts' and Henri Storck's remarkable analysis of an arrist's
composition and style in Rubens open up a new way to the
appreciation of art.

A genre of film-making in which a good deal more experiment
is needed is in the reconstruction of important pieces of scientific
endeavour, and in biographical film studies of the great men of
science. It is only through the development of these genres that
we shall educate the public into rejecting the faked distortions of
history which disgrace our screens. The manner in which the
Dartington Hall Film Unit retraced certain parts of Darvin's
Voyage of the Beagle in their film Galapagos was a fine attempt at
this sort of thing at the classroom level. The last film to be com-
pleted by Jean Painleve is an attempt to create a new sort of
scientific film biography for the ordinary cinemagoer. He and
Georges Rouquier have made an absorbing study out of the bio-
logical work of Louis Pasteur. Using an unknown, unprofessional
actor, a Paris workman with a strong facial resemblance to the
great savant, Rouquier has made the scenes in which Pasteur
fought against the prejudices of contemporary scientists come to
life again on the screen. But the main excitement of the film lies
in the way Painleve, through innumerable hours spent with
camera and microscope in his cinelaboratory, has retold the long
tale of Pasteur's triumph over the microbes. Painleve's passionate
and nervous commentary enhances the visual impact of the many
cinemicrographic studies in the film. Audaciously he tells the
public that they are seeing, through the movie camera, this drama
unfolding in a manner which would have surprised even Pasteur
himself. Painleve is, of course, an outstanding worker in all the
fields of scientific cinema of which we have been speaking, re-
search, record, demonstration and interpretation. Motor-racing
champion, under-water diver, biologist and creator of the
most elegant of bijouterie, he is a strange Renaissance figure of the

272

EXPERIMENT IN THE SCIENTIFIC FILM

modern cinema. For twenty years he has been triumphantly
demonstrating that the scientific film can be the most engrossing
of art forms. With La Pieuvre and Le Vampyr he has combined
legend and the more prosaic face of reality. In Crevettes, his
superb skill as an editor and cameraman is matched by Jaubert's
evocative music. Like his fellow countryman, Cousteau, who in
Paysages du Silence has depicted the dream landscapes to be
found beneath the waters of the Mediterranean, Painleve brings
an element of fantasy and imagination to everything he touches.
And this is surely not the least of the contributions which the film
can make to our understanding of science. Film can break down
frontiers which often divide the man of science and the artist,
frontiers as outmoded as those so-called faculties of the mind
which are sometimes used to label them.

is 273

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ROGER MANVELL

After working as a University Lecturer in literature, he joined
the Film Division of the M.O.I, during the War and subsequently
became Research Officer and lecturer for the British Film
Institute. A broadcaster and contributor to many journals
at home and abroad, he is author of 'Film' (Pelican Books),
Executive Officer of 'The Penguin Film Review' and editor of the
Falcon Press National Film Series. He is now Director of the
British Film Academy.

JACQUES BRUNIUS

Was assistant director to Rene Clair for The Italian Straw Hat,
and worked in the French avant-garde movement with, among
others, Luis Bunuel. He made a number of experimental films and
documentaries, and assisted several directors as script- writer and
editor, including Jean Renoir. During the war he worked in
London for the B.B.C. and the M.O.I. His work now includes
broadcasting and film criticism.

LEWIS JACOBS

Screenwriter, documentary film-maker and experimenter,
Lewis Jacobs is best known in this country for his monumental
history of the film in the States 'The Rise of the American Film'.
He is now working on a book about the art of the Film.

GRIGORI ROSHAL

Holds the rank of Artist of Merit. Is a distinguished director of
historical films of which the best known in this country are
Petersburg Night and Artamonov and Sons.

275

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ROMAN KARMEN

Is a prominent worker in Soviet documentary and a Stalin
prizewinner. Among his documentary-feature films are Spain,
A Day in the New World, and Leningrad Fights.

ERNST IROS

Turning to film work after work in theatrical production, Ernst
Iros was primarily concerned with the supervision of film script
work in Germany. He became Chief Producer to the important
Emelka Company. He wrote his important work 'Wesen und
Dramaturgic des Films' in Switzerland where it was published in
1938.

HANS RICHTER

Has an international reputation for his work in German avant-
garde film production. He has made films also in Switzerland and
Holland. He recently produced in America a full-length colour
film Dreams that Money Can Buy. He is now Director of the
Institute of Film Techniques at the College of the City of New
York.

EDGAR ANSTEY

Is a well-known producer of documentary films and film critic
for 'The Spectator' and the B.B.C. He began work with Grierson
in the earliest period of British documentary production, and his
films include Granton Trawler, Housing Problems and Enough to
Eat. He is now Chairman of Film Centre.

JOHN MADDISON

Began his career as a miner in Lancashire, and after graduation
at Liverpool University and the Sorbonne, was for some years a
schoolmaster. During the war he was on the staff of the Film
Division of the M.O.I, and is at present in charge of overseas
non-theatrical distribution of films at the Central Office of
Information. Has represented Britain at a number of scientific
film congresses abroad and is one of the Vice-Presidents of the
International Scientific Film Association.

276

NDEX OF TITLES

(Chief titles and references only are given.)

Absturz, 193.

Aero Engine, 250.

L' Affaire est dans le Sac, 103,

107.
L'Age d'Or, 45- 100-.
Alexander Nevsky, 156.
Alien's Invasion, The, 235.
Allegretto, 140.
Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt

sich, 228.
Am Rande de Welt, 200.
American March, An, 140.
Anitra's Dance, 131.
Anna and Elisabeth, 214.
At Land, 134.
L'Atalante, 23, 105-.

Ballet M6canique, Le, 64, 88,

124,224.
Battle of the Falkland and

Coronel Islands, 238.
Battleship Potemkin, The, 75,

77, 154, 243.
Berge in Flammen, 203.
Berlin, 47, 174, 197, 224.
Birth of a Nation, 27, 31-.
Blackmail, 241.
Blind Husbands, 76.
Blue Angel, The, 205.
Bluebottles, 242.

Blue Light, The, 213.
Boykott, 208.

Brennende Acker, Der, 192.
Brief Encounter, 24, 261.
Broken Earth, 130.
Biichse der Pandora, 195.
Burgtheater, 215.

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The,
116.

Chapayev, 166.

Chase, The, 142.

Chasing the Blues, 256.

Chien Andalou, Un, 63, 99-.

Children Learning by Exper-
ience, 271.

Chors, 160.

Cinemagazine, 256.

Cinq Minutes de Cinema Pur,
63-.

Citizen Kane, 30, 53.

Coalface, 248.

Cceur Fidele, 72, 81.

Commercial Medley, 128.

Common Touch, The, 259.

Concert (stereoscopic), 20.

Contact, 254.

Coquille et le Clergyman, Le,
99.

Crainquebille, 85.

Crevettes, 272.

277

INDEX OF TITLES

Dawn to Dawn, 130.

Day in a Victorious Country, A,

183.
Day in the New World, A, 183.
Day of War, A, 183.
Descendant of Genghis Khan,

158.
Desert Victory, 252.
Diable dans la Ville, Le, 84.
Diagonal Symphony, 223.
Don't Take it to Heart, 262.
Dreams that Money can Buy,

149, 233.
Dreigroschen Oper, Die, 211.
Dreyfus, 206.
Drifters, 242-.

Earth (Soil), 129, 159.

Emil und die Detektive, 210.

En Rade, 97.

Enough to Eat? 247.

Enthusiasm, 179.

Entr'acte, 63, 89.

Erinnerungen einer Nonne, 199.

Escape Episode, 136.

Even as You and I, 128.

Evening Star, 131.

Face of Britain, 254.

Fall of the House of Usher, The,

122.
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty,

175.
Fantasia, 140.
Fantasmagoria, 142.
Fantome de Moulin Rouge, Le,

90.
Faust, 198.
Feme, 200.

Fete Espagnole, La, 79.
Feu Mathias Pascal, 82.
Filmstudy, 225.
Finis Terrae, 80.

278

Fireworks, 136-.
Fluchtlinge, 215.
Fragment of Seeking, 137.
Frau im Mond, Die, 201.
Fraulein Julie, 193.
Friedericus Rex, 192.

Galapagos, 272.
Gefahren der Liebe, 209.
Gefahrliche Alter, Das, 194.
Gelt auf der Strasse, 192.
Geschlecht in Fesseln, 195.
Giotto, 272.

Glenn Falls Sequence, 142.
Gold Rush, The, 62.
Grande Illusion, La, 24.
Granton Trawler, 244.
Great Expectations, 263.
Great Road, 175.

H20, 123.
Henry V, 50- 262.
Hinter Gittern, 209.
Hollywood Extra, A, 117-.
L'Homme du Large, 82.
Hose, Die, 199.
House of Cards, 150.
Housing Problems, 247.
Hungarian Dance, 229.
Hyperbole, The, 270.

L'Idee, 104.

Industrial Britain, 244.

Inflation, 196.

L'Inhumaine, 82.

Intelligentsia of the Ural Mach-
ine Factory, 187.

In the Name of Our Soviet
Ukraine, 161.

Intolerance, 32-, 81.

Introspection, 142-.

Ivan, 157.

Ivan the Terrible, 51-.

INDEX OF TITLES

Jean HelioD, 148.

Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse,

63-.
Jour se leve, Le, 53-.
Judgment of the Nations, 185.

Kameradschaft, 55, 207.

Katte, 191.

Kinder vor Gericht, 209.

Kino-Eye, 174.

Kongress Tanzt, Der, 211.

Kuhle-Wampe, 231.

Melodie du Monde (Melody of
the World), 96, 197, 227.

Menilmontant, 24, 92.

Menschen am Sonntag, 192, 230.

Menschen im Kafig, 208.

Meshes of the Afternoon, 133.

Metall, 231.

Michelangelo, 272.

Millions like Us, 259-.

Mobile Composition, 124.

Moral um Mitternacht, 209.

Mother, 24, 40- 157.

Mr. Motorboat's Last Stand,
127.

Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins
Gltick, 195.

Land of Promise, 255.
Last Laugh, The, 24, 193.
Last Moment, The, 119-.
Leuchte Asiens, Die, 202.
Liebe, 199.
Liebelei, 213.
Liebeswalzer, 205.
Lion des Mogols, Le, 81.
Listen to Britain, 252.
Living Corpse, The, 201.
Lonedale Operator, The, 28.
Lot and Sodom, 129.
Love of Jeanne Ney, The, 38,

200.
Love on the Dole, 259.
Loves of Zero, The, 118.
Luther, 200.

New Gulliver, 162.

New Realism of Fernand L6ger,

148.
Nibelungen, 191, 224.
Nightmail, 250.
North Sea, 251.
Nuit sur le Mont Chauve, La,

104.

O
October, 35-.
Olivera Street, 131.
On Approval, 261.
Opera (Ruttman), 222.
Optical Poem, 140.
Our Country, 253.
Overlanders, The, 264.

M, 210.

Madchen in Uniform, 210.

Manhatta, 114-.

March of Time, 257.

Markt Am Wittenbergplatz, 230

Maskerade, 215.

Masters of Great Harvests, 187.

Matter of Life and Death, A, 57.

Mauprat, 81.

Mechanical Principles, 124.

Paisa, 56.

Parabola, 131.

Paris 1900, 98.

Paris qui Dort, 89.

Partie de Campagne, 108.

Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La,

21, 37, 41-, 44, 85.
Paysages du Silence, 272.
Peer Gynt, 214.
Perruque, La, 89.

279

INDEX OF TITLES

Personnel Selection in the Brit-
ish Army, 255, 270.

Phantom, 190.

Pie in the Sky, 12 7-.

Pieuvre, La, 272.

Plague Summer, 151.

Plow that broke the Plains, The,
47.

Portes de la Nuit, Les, 107.

Potted Psalm, The, 137-.

P'tite Lili, La, 88.

Rainbow Dance, 249.
Reanimation des Danseurs de la

Grece Antique, 270.
Rebell, Der, 203.
Regie du Jeu, 108.
Reifende Jugend, 208.
Rennsymphonie, 226.
Revoke im Erziehungshaus, 208
Rhythm 21, etc, 223.
Rien que les heures, 47.
Ritual in Transfigured Time,

135-.
River, The, 47.
Roue, La, 72, 80.
Rubens, 272

San Demetrio, London, 264.
Sang d'un Poete, Le, 101, 134.
Schwarze Walfish, Der, 214.
Schwester Veronika, 198.
Secrets of Nature (and Life),

236-, 268.
Secrets of the Soul, 24, 198.
Shakers, The, 148.
Simple Case, A, 159.
Skandal urn Eva, 208.
So ist das Leben, 231.
So Sind die Menschen, 211.
Song of Ceylon, The, 47-, 248.
Sonnenstrahl, 212.
Spellbound, 46.
Spionage, 200.

280

Sport Spools, 131.

Spy, The, 125-.

Stone Flower, 164.

Strasse, Die, 193.

Strasse der Verlorenen Seelen,

Die, 195.
Storm Warning, 144.
Story of a Disturbance, 269.
Story of a Nobody, 125.
Student of Prague, The, 189.
Study in Choreography for the

Camera, 135.
Sunday Beach, 147.
Surf and Seaweed, 124.
Sylvester, 91.
Synchronization, 130.

Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, Das,

195.
Tarantella, 131.
Target for Tonight, 251.
Tell-Tale Heart, The, 121.
Ten Days that Shook the World

(see October).
Therese Raquin, 124, 201.
They Met in Moscow, 168.
This Happy Breed, 261.
This Modern Age, 257.
Toccata and Fugue, 131.
Toenende Welle, 227.
Tractor Drivers, 168.
Transfer of Power, 250, 271.
Traumende Mund, Der, 212.
Tree Trunk to Head, 146.
Tunnel, Der, 214.
Turksib, 47.
Twenty-four Dollar Island, 114-

Ueberfall, 230.
Underground Printer, 130.
Unmogliche Liebe, 212.
Unter der Laterne, 195.

Vampyr, Le, 272.

Variete, 201.

Vormittagsspuk, 226.

Voruntersuchung, 209.

Vow, The, 166-.

Voyage Imaginaire, Le, 90, 93.

INDEX OF TITLES

White Hell of Pitz Palu, The,

202.
Wochenende, 227.
Workers and Jobs, 246.
World in Action, 257.
World is Rich, The, 255, 271.
World of Plenty, 255,271.

War in the East, 254.
War is Hell, 207.
Weisse Rausch, Der, 202.
Wer Nimmt die Liebe Ernst?

205.
Western Approaches, 54, 252.
Westfront 1918, 206.

Young Guard, 164-.

Zeebrugge, 238.
Zero de Conduite, 29, 106.
Zwei Welten, 207.
Zweigroschenzauber, 226.

281

INDEX OF NAMES

(Chief names and references only are given.)

Alexander, Donald, 256.
Alexandrov, C. V., 169.
Alexeief, 104.
Allegret, Marc, 87, 96.
Alwyn, William, 252.
Anger, Kenneth, 136-, 139.
Anstey, Edgar, 244, 247, 254.
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 66.
Arledge, Sara, 142, 148.
Asagarov, Georg, 208.
Asquith, Anthony, 241-.
Auden, W. H., 248.
Aurenche, Jean, 105.
Auriol, Jean-George, 75.
Autant-Lara, Claude, 87.

Balazs, Bela, 199, 211, 214.
Balcon, Sir Michael, 264.
Barlow, Roger, 128.
Barry, Iris, 38.
Bartosch, Berthold, 104, 204.
Basse, Wilfried, 196, 230.
Baxter, John, 259.
Baxter, R. K. Neilson, 254.
Bell, Geoffrey, 250, 255, 271.
Belyaev, Vasili, 187.
Berger, Ludwig, 200.
Berne, Joseph, 130.
Bitzer, B., 16.
Blakeston, Oswald, 242.
Boikov, V., 187.
Bolvary, Geza von, 205.
Bouchard, Thomas, 130, 148.

282

Brecht, Bert; 232, 233.
Breton, Andre, 92, 96.
Britten, Benjamin, 248.
Broughton, James, 137.
Brunei, Adrian, 242.
Brunius, Jacques B., 75, 76, 87,

98, 105.
Buchanan, Andrew, 256.
Bufiuel, Luis, 45-, 60, 63, 96,

98- 104.
Burnford, Paul, 144-.
Bute, Mary Ellen, 131.

Calder, Alexander, 149.
Cameron, Ken, 253.
Canti, R. G., 269.
Canudo, Ricciotto, 67, 219.
Carne, Marcel, 53, 96, 106-.
Cavalcanti, Alberto, 47, 79, 83,

86- 96- 104, 247-.
Chambers, Jack, 256.
Chaplin, Charles, 62.
Charell, Erik, 211.
Chavance, Louis, 106.
Chenal, Pierre, 96.
Chiaureli, Michael, 166-.
Chomette, Henri, 63, 87.
Clair, Rene, 60, 63, 69-, 86-,

94, 96, 103.
Cocteau, Jean, 101, 105, 134.
Cohen-Seat, Gilbert, 21, 22.
Comandon, Jean, 267-.
Cousteau, J., 272.

INDEX OF NAMES

Coward, Noel, 260.
Crockwell, Douglas, 141.
Cserepy, R. von, 192.
Czinner, Paul, 195, 199, 212.

Dali, Salvador, 45, 46, 98- 111.

Dell, Geoffrey, 261.

Delluc, Louis, 67, 70-1, 73, 78-

91, 219.

Deren, Maya, 133-, 138, 139,

148, 151.
Desnos, Robert, 60, 70, 74-, 87,

92, 101.

Diehl Brothers, 198.
Dieterle, William, 195, 201.
Disney, Walt, 46.
Dovzhenko, A., 47, 129, 159-.
Dreyer, Carl, 23, 37, 41- 85.
Duchamp, Marcel, 86-, 149.
Dudow, 232, 233.
Dulac,Germaine,79,84,85,87,99
Dupont, E. A., 207.
Durden, H. V., 268.

Eggeling, Viking, 221-.
Eisenstein, Sergei M., 16, 18,

34-, 48- 154-, 243.
Eldridge, John, 253.
Elton, Arthur, 246, 250, 271.
Engel, Erich, 205.
Epstein, Jean, 22, 80-, 85, 98.
Ernst, Max, 149.

Fairthorne, Robert, 270.
Fanck, Arnold, 202.
Farkas, Nicholas, 215.
Fejos, Paul, 119, 209.
Feuillade, Louis, 88-9.
Feyder, Jacques, 85, 124, 201.
Field, Mary, 238-, 258, 268.
Fischinger, Oscar, 131, 140, 198,

229-, 233.
Flaherty, Robert, 47, 115-,

245- 248, 250.
Florey, Robert, 117-.
Flory, John, 127.
Ford, John, 29.

Forst, Willy, 215.
Fowle, Chick, 251.
Frend, Charles, 264.
Freulich, Roman, 130.
Frohlich, Carl, 208.
Galeen, Henrik, 190.
Gallone, Carmine, 205.
Gance, Abel, 72, 73, 79-, 85.
Gerasimov, S., 164-.
Gercon, Jo, 124-.
Gilliat, Sydney, 259, 264.
Gilson, Paul, 98.
Gr^millon, Jean, 97, 104.
Greville, Edmond, 76, 87.
Griffith, David W., 16, 17, 27,

32- 37, 65-.
Grierson, John, 18, 243- 257.
Gromaire, Marcel, 72.
Grune, Karl, 193, 199, 200.
Gunn, George, 254.

Haesaerts, 272
Hammid, Alexander, 133.
Harrington, Curtis, 135, 139.
Hepworth, Cecil, 235.
Hitchcock, Alfred, 46, 240-.
Huff, Theodore, 127.
Hughes, A., 269.

Ivanov, B., 20.

Jackson, Pat, 252.

Jacobs, Lewis, 28, 124, 128,

130, 131, 146-.
Jannings, Emil, 193-, 201, 214.
Jeakins, Adrian, 255.
Jennings, Humphrey, 252.
Jones, Jonah, 251.
Junghans, Karl, 231, 233.

Kaufmann, Dr. Nicholas, 201.
Kazan, Elia, 127.
Keene, Ralph, 249.
Kessler, Chester, 151.
Kirsanov, Dimitri, 92.
Klaren, George, 210.
Klein, Charles, 121.

283

INDEX OF NAMES

Korda, Sir Alexander, 263, 264.
Kysela, Franz, 270.

Lacombe, Georges, 96.
Lamprecht, Gerhard, 195, 198,

210, 213.
Land, Robert, 208.
Lang, Fritz, 48, 191- 193, 200-,

210.
Launder, Frank, 259, 264.
Lazslo. 198.
Lean, David, 261, 263.
Leclerc, J., 269.
Leger, Fernand, 82, 86-.
Legg, Stuart, 257.
Lerner, Irving, 127.
L'Herbier, Marcel, 73, 82-.
Lorentz, Pare, 47.
Louis, Hershell, 124-.
Lubitsch, Ernst, 190.
Lumiere, Louis, 13.
Lye, Len, 249-.

Mallet-Stevens, 82-.
Manvell, Roger, 49.
Martin, Frank, 73.
Mayer, Karl, 91, 193.
McLaren, Normau, 249.
Meerson, Lazare, 104.
Meisel, Edmund, 224.
Melies, Georges, 13, 65.
Metzner, Ernoe, 230, 233.
Mittler, Leo, 211.
Montagu, Ivor, 242.
Mosjoukine, Ivan, 81, 82.
Moussinac, L., 75.
Murnau, F. W., 192, 198.
Muse, Clarence, 130.

Nemeth, Ted, 131.

Neilson, Asta, 192-, 194, 212.

Neurath, Otto, 271.

Olivier, Sir Laurence, 50-,262-.
Ophiils, Max, 213.
Oswald, Richard, 200, 206.
Ozep, Fedor, 201.

284

Pabst, G. W., 24, 37, 55, 194,
195, 198,200,206-209,211.

Painleve\ Jean, 97, 272-.

Paul, Heinz, 206-.

Peterson, Sidney, 137.

Picabia, Francis, 87, 89.

Pick, Lupu, 194.

Pinschewer, Julius, 203-.

Powell, Michael, 57, 264.

Pressburger, Emeric, 264.

Prevert, Jacques, 53, 103, 104,
106, 107-.

Prevert, Pierre, 103, 106.

Prokofiev, S., 49.

Proust, M., 52-.

Prudhommeau, Germaine, 270.

Ptushko, Alexander, 163-.

Pudovkin, V. I., 18, 34, 37, 40,
62, 157-, 272.

Pyriev, Ivan, 168-.

Ramain, Dr. Paul, 71, 93.

Ray, Charles, 81.

Ray, Man, 86-, 90, 149.

Reed, Carol, 264.

Reiniger, Lotte, 197, 228.

Renoir, Jean, 53, 86-, 93, 103,

108.
Richter, Hans, 149, 196, 219-,

233.
Riefenstahl, Leni, 202, 214.
Rodker, Francis, 250, 252.
Romm, Michael, 165-.
Rossellini, Roberto, 55.
Rotha, Paul, 246, 247, 254-,

271.
Ruttmann, Walther, 47, 98,

196-, 204, 222-232.

Sagan, Leontine, 210.
Salisbury, Dr. E. J., 268.
Sauvage, Andre, 96.
Schillinger, Joseph, 131.
Schunzel, Reinhold, 192.
Scott, Ivan, 257.
Seeber, Guido, 224, 225.
Seibert, Mike, 131.

INDEX OF NAMES

Sellars, George, 258.

Shamroy, Leon, 119-.

Shaw, Alexander, 249.

Sheeler, Charles, 115.

Shub, Esvir, 174-.

Shuftan, Eugen, 230.

Silver, Marcel, 91.

Siodmak, Robert, 197, 209, 230

233.
Smart, Ralph, 258.
Smith, Brian, 255.
Smith, Percy, 236-, 267-, 270.
Steiner, Ralph, 123, 127.
Stern, Seymour, 130.
Sternberg, Joseph von, 206.
Strand, Paul, 115.
Stroheim, Erich von, 76.
Storch, Otto, 268.
Storck, Henri, 272.

Tallents, Sir Stephen, 245.
Taylor, Donald, 253.
Taylor, John, 251, 255.
Tedesco, Jean, 76, 92.
Thatcher, Molly Day, 127.
Thiele, Eugen, 209.
Thiele, Wilhelm, 205.
Thomas, Dylan, 253.
Thomson, Margaret, 255.
Tisse, E., 16.
Toland, Gregg, 117.
Townley, Charles, 254.
Trenker, Luis, 202-.
Trivas, Victor, 206.
Turin, V., 47.

Ucicky, Gustav, 201, 215.
Ullmer, Edgar, 230.

Vassiliev Brothers, 166.

Vedres, Nicole, 98.

Vertov, Dziga, 126, 172-, 179.

Vidor, Charles, 125.

Vigo, Jean, 23, 29, 96, 103, 105-

Vogel, Joseph, 150.

Volkov, Nicholas, 81.

Vorkapich, Slavko, 117, 143.

Walton, William, 50.
Watson, James Sibley, 121,129.
Watson- Watt, Sir Robert, 269.
Watt, Harry, 250- 263.
Webber, Melville, 121, 129.
Wegener, Paul, 190.
Weinberg, Herman, 118, 129.
Weine, Robert, 190.
Welles, Orson, 53.
Wendhausen, Fritz, 214.
Whitney, John & James, 140,

150, 151.
Wilder, Billy, 230, 233.
Woolfe, H. Bruce, 238- 268.
Wright, Basil, 47-, 248-, 251.

Zelnik, Friedrich, 205.
Zernicke, F., 269.

285

Catalogue No. R6064

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